a consolation, because he brought into it the same thought of home-coming that marks his treatment of nature and the passions. Partly, this was due to his inherited creed, which was tolerant enough to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he once wrote to Lucy Larcom, "has no Church of its own-it belongs to the Church Universal and Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith was private to him; it even called for a note of apology to the sterner of his brethren:

O friends! with whom my feet have trod
The quiet aisles of prayer,

Glad witness to your zeal for God
And love of man I bear.

I trace your lines of argument;
Your logic linked and strong
I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hands are weak
To hold your iron creeds:

Against the words ye bid me speak
My heart within me pleads.

And the inimitably tender conclusion:

And so beside the Silent Sea

I wait the muffled oar;

No harm from Him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.

O brothers! if my faith is vain,
If hopes like these betray,

Pray for me that my feet may gain

The sure and safer way.

And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen

Thy creatures as they be,
Forgive me if too close I lean

My human heart on Thee!

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted -not the mood of the battling saints, but one familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier through the familiar poetry of Cowper; consider what it would have been to that tormented soul if for one day he could have forgotten the awe of his divinity and leaned his human heart on God. It is not good for any but the strongest to dwell too much with abstractions of the mind. And, after all, change the phrasing a little, substitute if you choose some other intuitive belief for the poet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised to find how many of the world's philosophers would accept the response of Whittier:

We search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,

We come back laden from our quest,

To find that all the sages said

Is in the Book our mothers read.

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious, but is it any more so than the petulance of Renan because all his learning had only brought him to the same state of skepticism as that of the gamin in the streets of Paris? Our tether is short enough, whichever way we seek escape. It is worth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who conceived of the saints' rest in a very different spirit) Whittier blames that worthy just for the exaltation of his character. "In our view," he says, "this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly."

And if Whittier's faith was simple and human, his vision of the other world was strangely like the remembrance of a home that we have left in youth. There is a striking expression of this in one of his prose tales, now almost forgotten despite their elements of pale but very genuine humour and pathos, as if written by an attenuated Hawthorne. The good physician, Dr. Singletary, and his friends are discussing the future life, and says one of them:

"Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and hopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of pearl, the thrones,

temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of our native valleys; the woodpaths, where moss carpets are woven with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms-the sweet, familiar voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange splendours and unknown music, should we not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our old home?"

It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay awaiting death, with his kinsfolk gathered about him, one of them should have recited the stanzas of his psalm At Last:

When on my day of life the night is falling,

And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, I hear far voices out of darkness calling

My feet to paths unknown,

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
Be Thou my strength and stay!

I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
Nor street of shining gold.

Suffice it if-my good and ill unreckoned,

And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace— I find myself by hands familiar beckoned

Unto my fitting place.

I would not call this the highest religious poetry, pure and sweet as it may be. Something

still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one must travel out of Whittier's age, back through all the eighteenth century, back into the seventeenth. There you will find it in Vaughan and Herbert and sometimes in Marvell-poets whom Whittier read and admired. Take two poems from these two ages, place them side by side, and the one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. The first poem Whittier wrote after the death of his sister Elizabeth (who had been to him what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper) was The Vanishers, founded on a pretty superstition he had read in Schoolcraft:

Sweetest of all childlike dreams

In the simple Indian lore
Still to me the legend seems
Of the shapes who flit before.

Flitting, passing, seen, and gone,

Never reached nor found at rest,
Baffling search, but beckoning on
To the Sunset of the Blest.

From the clefts of mountain rocks,
Through the dark of lowland firs,
Flash the eyes and flow the locks
Of the mystic Vanishers!

Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone from him:

They are all gone into the world of light,

And I alone sit lingering here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,

And my sad thoughts doth clear.