“The unsung beauty hid life’s common things below.”
What compensation to him for the limitations which his life work for
the slave and his own delicate health imposed upon him! In proclaiming
the slave his brother, Whittier came to perceive his own brotherhood
with all men bound in whatever slavery of mind and soul, to see that
simplicity and reality were the great forces of life and inspiration in
poetry as in all other things. His own early instructions prepared him
for Burns’ assertion,
“A man’s a man for a’that.”
And from Burns’ most beautiful song Whittier sings,
“With clearer eyes I saw the worth
Of life among the lowly;
The Bible at his cotter’s hearth
Has made my own more holy.”
These dreams and perceptions made him the poet of New England idyls, as
did his spiritual inspiration of her ideals. He looked with anointed
eyes upon her woods and fields, her hills and streams and her rocky
coast. It was first through Burns and then through his own life that he
sang:
“Yet on life’s current, he who drifts
Is one with him who rows or sails;
And he who wanders widest lifts
No more of beauty’s jealous veils
Than he who from his doorway sees
The miracle of flowers and trees,
Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air
And from cloud minaret hears the sunset call to prayer!”
He sings the beauty in brooks and fields, the oneness that pervades all
nature, and how to the opened eyes,
“From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles,
And Rome’s cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles.”
This world of beauty in everyday life Whittier has revealed to those
who do not travel; he has opened their eyes to perceive how great are
their possessions, not in the far-away, nor in the future, but here and
now. Other poets may arouse longings for the unattainable; but Whittier
has shown us how the manna of life lies at our own doors waiting for us
to gather. Burns with inspired lyre sings of the daisy and the mouse,
of the Doon and the Ayr, of men and of his “Highland Mary.” Whittier
sings of flower and tree and field, of mountain and river, of men and
women. But over all his pictures arches the depth of the sky giving
them perspective and illumination. When he sings of the sea,
“The ocean looketh up to God
As ’twere a living thing;
The homage of its waves is given
In ceaseless worshipping.”
And of life’s trials,
“... darkness in the pathway of man’s life
Is but the shadow of God’s providence
By the great Sun of Wisdom cast thereon.”