Last month we took the new edition of Cowper's Letters as an occasion to
consider the life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections of the
home into English literature, and that may be our excuse for waiving the
immediate pressure of the book-market and turning to the American poet
whose inspiration springs largely from the same source. Different as the
two writers are in so many respects, different above all in their
education and surroundings, yet it would not be difficult to find points
of resemblance to justify such a sequence. In both the spirit of
religion was bound up with the cult of seclusion; to both the home was a
refuge from the world; to both this comfort was sweetened by the care of
a beloved companion, though neither of them ever married. But, after
all, no apology is needed, I trust, for writing about a poet who is very
dear to me as to many others, and who has suffered more than most at the
hands of his biographers and critics.
It should seem that no one could go through Whittier's poems even
casually without remarking the peculiar beauty of the idyl called _The
Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. It is one of the longest and, all things
considered, quite the most characteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard
in his official biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor
Carpenter names it in passing without a word of comment; and Colonel
Higginson in his volume in the English Men of Letters Series does not
mention it at all--but then he has a habit of omitting the essential.
Among those who have written critically of American literature the poem
is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors
Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracy
of silence, as I hunted through one historian and critic after another,
grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust my own judgment until I
chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of Whittier's letters.
Writing of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ to his publisher in May, 1872, he
said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any long
poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as
long as _Snow-Bound_, and better, but nobody will find it out." One
suspects that all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely
followed the line of least resistance, without taking much care to form
an independent opinion; and the line of least resistance has a miserable
trick of leading us astray. In the first place, Whittier's share in the
Abolition and other reforming movements bulks so large in the
historians' eyes that sometimes they seem almost to forget Whittier the
poet. And the critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier," says one of
them, "will be remembered even more as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation
than as the peaceful singer of rural New England."
The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher,
and in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature
over the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned
out so much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such
exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East
Haverhill, in the old homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden
among the hills from any other human habitation. It is a country not
without quiet charm, though the familiar lines of _Snow-Bound_ make us
think of it first as beaten by storm and locked in by frost. And,
notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate home, life on the farm was
unnecessarily hard. The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and
weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who
used to drive regularly to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles
distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect themselves from the
bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all his life from the rigour
of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency of mental
training. Not only was the family poor, but it even appears that the
sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited means of
education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was the
boy allowed to attend the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a
little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher--he seems to have
shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few--he has
told us how few--books in the house, and little time for reading those
he could borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story
of his first printed poem in the _Free Press_ of Newburyport and of the
encouragement given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd
Garrison, is one of the best known and most picturesque incidents in
American letters. The young poet--he was then nineteen--was launched;
from that time he became an assiduous writer for the press, and was at
intervals editor of various country or propagandist newspapers.
The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar
and troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the
ambition was soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland
to the hills and folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang
seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed
to the Quaker lad, and one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little
book, _Whittier-Land_, verses and fragments of letters which show how
deeply that poison of the age had bitten into his heart. But the
influence of those sons of fire was more than counteracted by the gentle
spirit of Mrs. Hemans--indeed, the worst to be said of Whittier is that
never, to the day of his death, did he quite throw off allegiance to
the facile and innocent muse of that lady. It is only right to add that
in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war,
he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is
commonly supposed to have been.
Such was the boy, then--thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally
without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that--who
was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To
one of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and
unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England
literature. Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at
the best, although in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than
confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it could offer no spiritual
seduction to one who held liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends.
But to the other influence he fell a natural prey. The whole tradition
of the Quakers--the memory of Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the
Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John Woolman, whose
Journal he was to edit--prepared him to take part in the great battle of
the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met Garrison face to
face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no
longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform and
politics. I am not, of course, criticising that movement or its
achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for
fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy
arena. As he says in lines that are true if not elegant:
Hater of din and riot,
He lived in days unquiet;
And, lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty.
It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which
would otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired
might have compensated and more than compensated for less writing, and,
indeed, he wrote too much as it was. The difficulty is rather that "the
pledged philanthropy of earth" somehow militates against art, as
Whittier himself felt. Not only the poems actually written to forward
the propaganda are for the most part dismal reading, but something of
their tone has crept into other poems, with an effect to-day not far
from cant. Twice the cry of the liberator in Whittier rose to noble
writing. But in both cases it is not the mere pleading of reform but a
very human and personal indignation that speaks. In _Massachusetts to
Virginia_ this feeling of outrage calls forth one of the most stirring
pieces of personification ever written, nor can I imagine a day when a
man of Massachusetts shall be able to read it without a tingling of the
blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense of unacknowledged
shame; in _Ichabod_ he uttered a word of individual scorn that will rise
up for quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, or is thought to
misuse, his powers. Every one knows the lines in which Webster is
pilloried for his defection:
Of all we loved and honoured, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.
All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled;
When faith is lost, when honour dies,
The man is dead!
Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
It is instructive that only when his note is thus pierced by individual
emotion does the reformer attain to universality of appeal.
Unfortunately most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a dreary
level--down to the almost humorous pathos of the lines suggested by
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_:
Dry the tears for holy Eva,
With the blessed angels leave her....
What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least
of all able to give him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven
him to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely
poetical in stronger relief--a purely literary canon which would have
offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him
(and his essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to
write of Longfellow's _Psalm of Life_: "These nine simple verses are
worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth.
They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we
live--the moral steam enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and
Matthew Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tradition had not
entirely died out in America that the first proof of genius is an
abandonment of one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." Byron had
written verse as vacillating and formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley
had poured forth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keats learned
the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; Wordsworth indulged in
platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but none of these poets suffered
so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the finest of our New
England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and
originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their licence,
were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of Whittier's
muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace joys and
cares of the heart needs above all to attain that _simplex munditiis_
which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself
commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general
collection of his poems, he wrote:
Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Unskilled the subtle line to trace,
Or softer shades of Nature's face,
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.
Nor mine the seer-like power to show
The secrets of the heart and mind;
_To drop the plummet line below
Our common world of joy and woe,
A more intense despair or brighter hope to find._
But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward
is not that he showed "a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on
the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he
developed the peculiarly English _ideal of the home_ which Cowper first
brought intimately into letters, and added to it those _homely comforts
of the spirit_ which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined
to throw the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy
and woe."
Perhaps something in his American surroundings fitted him peculiarly for
this humbler role. The fact that the men who had made the new colony
belonged to the middle class of society tended to raise the idea of
home into undisputed honour, and the isolation and perils of their
situation in the earlier years had enhanced this feeling into something
akin to a cult. America is still the land of homes. That may be a lowly
theme for a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed it does, seem to
many to smack of a bourgeois taste. And yet there is an implication here
that carries a grave injustice. For myself, I admit that Whittier is one
of the authors of my choice, and that I read him with ever fresh
delight; I even think there must be something spurious in that man's
culture whose appreciation of Milton or Shelley dulls his ear to the
paler but very refined charm of Whittier. If truth be told, there is
sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning from the pretentious
poets who exact so much of the reader to the more immediate appeal of
our sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more exalted muses his nymph
is like the nut-brown lass of the old song--
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say No.
And often, after fatiguing the brain with the searchings and inquisitive
flight of the Masters, we are ready to say with Whittier:
I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at my door.
There, to me at least, and not in the ballads which are more generally
praised, lies the rare excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of
these narrative poems are spirited and admirably composed. Now and then,
as in _Cassandra Southwick_, they strike a note which reminds one
singularly of the real ballads of the people; in fact, it would not be
fanciful to discover a certain resemblance between the manner of their
production and of the old popular songs. Their publication in obscure
newspapers, from which they were copied and gradually sent the rounds of
the country, is not essentially different from the way in which many of
the ballads were probably spread abroad. The very atmosphere that
surrounded the boy in a land where the traditions of border warfare and
miraculous events still ran from mouth to mouth prepared him for such
balladry. Take, for example, this account of his youth from the
Introduction to _Snow-Bound_:
Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in
the long winter evenings. My father when a young man had traversed
the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with
Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French
villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and
fishing, and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at
least half-believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who
was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New
Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads
of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors.
No doubt this legendary training helped to give more life to Whittier's
ballads and border tales than ordinarily enters into that rather
factitious form of composition; and for a while he made a deliberate
attempt to create out of it a native literature. But the effect was
still deeper, by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home. After
several incursions into the world as editor and agitator, he was
compelled by ill health to settle down finally in the Amesbury house,
which he had bought in 1836; and there with little interruption he lived
from his thirty-third to his eighty-fifth year, the year of his death.
In _Snow-Bound_ his memory called up a picture of the old Haverhill
homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for sincerity and picturesqueness; in
poem after poem he celebrated directly or indirectly "the river hemmed
with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, the very roads and bridges of
the land about these sheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollection
of the wilder life through which his parents had come added to the
snugness and intimacy of these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand,
the encroachment of trade and factories into their midst lent a
poignancy of regret for a grace that was passing away. Mr. Pickard's
little guide-book, to which I have already referred, brings together
happily the innumerable allusions of local interest; there is no spot in
America, not even Concord, where the light of fancy lies so
entrancingly:
A tender glow, exceeding fair,
A dream of day without its glare.
For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the
thorny ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no
means all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an
admirable craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less
difficult--which I sometimes think is almost more difficult--because it
lies so perilously near the trivial and mean. There are others which
need only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening here and there,
to approach the same perfection of charm. Especially they have that
harmony of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of the writer
and ends by subduing the reader to a restful sympathy with their mood.
No one can read much in Whittier without feeling that these hills and
valleys about the Merrimac have become one of the inalienable domiciles
of the spirit--a familiar place where the imagination dwells with
untroubled delight. Even the little things, the flowers and birds of the
country, are made to contribute to the sense of homely content. There is
one poem in particular which has always seemed to me significant of
Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the famous flower poems
of Wordsworth will show the difference between what I call the poetry
of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was written to
celebrate a gift of _Pressed Gentian_ that hung at the poet's window,
presenting to wayside travellers only a "grey disk of clouded glass":
They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;
For there the flower, whose fringes through
The frosty breath of autumn blew,
Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.
So from the trodden ways of earth
Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
And offer to the careless glance
The clouding grey of circumstance....
There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower,
and it may be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are
like the hasty passer-by--they see only the _grey disk of clouded
glass_.
And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued
in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence
enough that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic
melancholy, and he himself somewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneath
his aspect grave, What passions strove in chains." But was there not a
remnant of self-deception here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us
like to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of vigorous
self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember, explained the absence of love
from his poetry on the ground that his passions were too violent to
allow any safe expression of them. Possibly they were. Certainly, in
Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, but only
"the Indian summer of the heart." The very title, _Memories_, of his
best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the details of which
have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which he approaches
this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the
home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by
the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad _Maud
Muller_, which is supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is
attuned to that shamelessly provincial rhyme,
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the
maiden; only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely
to be mingled strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most
comfortable and flattering Quaker drab--as it did with our "hermit of
Amesbury."
If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an
ever-present consolation--peculiarly 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 Whittler'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.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd,
After the sun's remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier's inferior
productions beside this superbest hymn of an eloquent age; but would any
religious poem of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, fare
much better? There is indeed one thing lacking, and that is _ecstasy_.
But ecstasy demands a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's
day or ours, and, missing that, I do not see why we should begrudge our
praise to a genius of pure and quiet charm.
I have already intimated that too complete a preoccupation with the
reforming and political side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers
from recognising that charm in what he himself regarded as his best
poem. In 1872, in the full maturity of his powers and when the national
peace had allowed him to indulge the peace in his own heart, he wrote
his exquisite idyl, _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. Perhaps the mere name of
the poem may suggest another cause why it has been overlooked. Whittier
has always stood pre-eminently as the exponent of New England life, and
for very natural reasons. And yet it would not be difficult to show
from passages in his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease
in that Puritan land. The recollection of the sufferings which his
people had undergone for their faith' sake rankled a little in his
breast, and he was never in perfect sympathy with the austerity of New
England traditions. We catch a tone of relief as he turns in imagination
to the peace that dwelt "within the land of Penn":
Who knows what goadings in their sterner way
O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey,
Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?
What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?
What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke
In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?
It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he
learned the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the
fatherland and the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of
Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley
between the Schuylkill and the Delaware--
Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay
Along the wedded rivers--
offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the
faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the
harmony of the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the
lack of elevation that so often stints our praise becomes a suave and
mellow beauty. All the better elements of his genius are displayed here
in opulent freedom. The affections of the heart unfold in unembittered
serenity. The sense of home seclusion is heightened by the presence of
the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed by any harsher contrast.
Within is familiar joy and retirement unassailed--not without a touch of
humour, as when in the evening, "while his wife put on her look of
love's endurance," Pastorius took down his tremendous manuscript--
And read, in half the languages of man,
His _Rusca Apium_, which with bees began,
And through the gamut of creation ran.
(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now
and then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome
guest--some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von
Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young
city,
Lovely even then
With its fair women and its stately men
Gracing the forest court of William Penn;
or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like
Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse,"
Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den
By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.
Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the
gardener and botanist, while
the seasons went
Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent
Of their own calm and measureless content.
The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of
description. Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its
economy of simple grace,
Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?
No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some echo
of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is,
indeed, as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question
here takes on its most human and least political form; it lets in just
enough of the outside world of action to save the idyl from unreality.
Nor could religion well be absent; rather, the whole poem may be called
an illustration through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking
to him not with loud and controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox,
but with the still, small voice of comfortable persuasion:
A Voice spake in his ear,
And lo! all other voices far and near
Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.
The Light of Life shone round him; one by one
The wandering lights, that all misleading run,
Went out like candles paling in the sun.
The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking
meeting-ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only
the songs of the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest
passages of the poem. How dear those hours of common worship were to
Whittier may be understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who
asked him why he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature:
But nature is not solitude;
She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes.
* * * * *
And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on every side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.
For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow
wrote a sonnet on _The Three Silences of Molinos_--the silence of
speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious
sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time
in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is
quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so
much that calls to us in other poets.