A SNOW-BOUND SAINT
The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution,
set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their
victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was
deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for
liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a
family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the
great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant
appreciation from the literary critics of his country.
John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and
grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country
school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who
spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns.
The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow
up to be the Burns of New England; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch
poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices.
Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in
Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his
education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler.
You remember the sneer of the Tory critic--“Back to your gallipots, Mr.
Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax
still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in
love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and
presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned,
and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated.
But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as
editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in
his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble
beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William
Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of
duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his
career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five
hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in
these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing
mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that
back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched
in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his
head in Philadelphia.
He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the
cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent
upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he
wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up
and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of
these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads
them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor
and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of
imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his
propaganda. You recall Browning’s rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth,
“The Lost Leader.” Here is Whittier’s “Ichabod,” rebuking Daniel
Webster for his apostasy to the cause of freedom--
All else is gone, from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Whittier was not among the fanatics of the movement; on the contrary, he
was a shrewd politician, interested in moving the minds of his fellows
and in getting something done. He helped in the forming of the Abolition
party, which later became the Free Soil party, and then the Republican
party of Lincoln. As a Quaker he could not support the war, yet he
managed to write verses about it--for example, when Stonewall Jackson
was unwilling to kill old Barbara Frietchie for hanging out the Stars
and Stripes in Frederick. It is probable that this incident never
happened, but it made a very popular poem.
Whittier never went to college, he never traveled in Europe to acquire a
foreign tone; he remained an American peasant. He voiced their thoughts
in their own language, and they have cherished him, and will some day
force the critics to give him his due place. If you are looking for
ballads made out of native material, read the story of old Skipper
Ireson, who roused the fury of his villagers by sailing away from a ship
in distress:
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead.
If you are looking for American sentiment, for simple, untouched
democracy, read “Maud Muller.” Above all, if you want the inner essence
of New England farm life, the mingled harshness and beauty of its body,
and the mingled sternness and charm of its spirit, read “Snow-Bound”