JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
[Illustration:
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
_From a miniature by Porter about 1838_
]
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE
BY BLISS PERRY
WITH SELECTED POEMS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
MDCCCCVII
COPYRIGHT 1907 BY BLISS PERRY AND HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published November 1907_
NOTE
_The occasion for this little volume is the celebration of the centenary
of Whittier’s birth. The sketch of his life aims to present the chief
formative influences which affected his career and determined the
character of his poetry. The poems have been chosen with the intention
of illustrating, first, the circumstances of Whittier’s boyhood and the
themes to which his poetic imagination naturally turned, then the
political and social struggle which engrossed so many of his years, and
finally that mood of devout resting and waiting in which his long life
closed._
CONTENTS
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: 1
A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE
SELECTED POEMS
THE BAREFOOT BOY (1855) 37
IN SCHOOL-DAYS (1870) 40
THE WHITTIER FAMILY. (FROM “SNOW-BOUND”) (1866) 42
MY PLAYMATE (1860) 54
TELLING THE BEES (1858) 57
BURNS: ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM (1854) 60
THE SHIP-BUILDERS (1846) 65
SKIPPER IRESON’S RIDE (1857) 68
MAUD MULLER (1854) 72
RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE (1833?) 78
MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA (1843) 83
THE PINE-TREE (1846) 87
ICHABOD (1850) 89
THE LOST OCCASION (1880) 91
BARBARA FRIETCHIE (1863) 94
LAUS DEO! (1865) 98
ON RECEIVING AN EAGLE’S QUILL FROM LAKE SUPERIOR (1849) 100
MY PSALM (1859) 104
THE ETERNAL GOODNESS (1865) 107
AT LAST (1882) 110
NOTE
_The frontispiece portrait of Whittier is from a miniature by Porter,
painted about 1838. The portrait which faces page 36 is from an
ambrotype taken about 1857. Both the miniature and ambrotype are in the
possession of Samuel T. Pickard, Amesbury, Mass._
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
The loneliness of the homestead in which Whittier was born, on December
17, 1807, has been described by the poet himself and emphasized by his
biographers. It is a solitary spot, even to-day. The farmhouse, built by
the poet’s great-great-grandfather in 1688, has been preserved by the
affectionate solicitude of the Whittier Homestead Association. After the
ravages of fire and of time it has been scrupulously restored. The
old-fashioned garden, the lawn sloping to the brook, the very
stepping-stones, the beehives, the bridle-post, the worn door-stone, the
barn across the road, even the surrounding woods of pine and oak, are
all, as nearly as may be, precisely what they were a hundred years ago.
The shadow of Job’s Hill still darkens the pleasant little stream and
the narrow meadows of the homestead. In the dusk of August evenings the
deer come out to feed among the alders. The neighborhood remains
sparsely settled. No other house is within sight or hearing. Even in
summer the rural quiet is scarcely broken, and the winter landscape
makes an almost sombre impression of physical seclusion.
The intellectual isolation of the poet’s youth has likewise been
impressed upon every reader of “Snow-Bound.” The books in that Quaker
farmhouse were few and unattractive. The local newspaper came once a
week. The teachers of the district school often knew scarcely more
literature than their scholars. In the Friends’ meeting-house at
Amesbury, which the Whittiers faithfully attended, there was little of
that intellectual stimulus which the sermons of an highly educated
clergy then offered to the orthodox. The hour of the New England
lyceum—that curiously effective though short-lived popular
university—had not yet come. Yet our own generation, bewildered by far
too many newspapers, magazines, and books, is apt to forget that a few
vitalizing ideas may more than make good the lack of printed matter.
Whittier, who was to become the poet of Freedom, felt even in boyhood,
in that secluded valley of the Merrimac, the pulse of the great European
movement of emancipation which has transformed, and is still
transforming, our modern world. “My father,” he wrote afterwards, “was
an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the
Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence.” In his
poem “Democracy” he reasserts his own and his father’s faith: —
“Oh, ideal of my boyhood’s time!
The faith in which my father stood,
Even when the sons of Lust and Crime
Had stained thy peaceful courts with blood!”
Not even the terrors of the French Revolution, it seems, could shake the
silent John Whittier’s steadfast belief in the natural rights of man. He
entertained in the old farmhouse William Forster, the distinguished
British advocate of abolition. He transmitted to his boys a hatred of
“priests and kings” which befitted the descendants of forbears who had
felt the weight of the displeasure of the Puritan theocracy. Not that
the Whittiers were agitators: they were taciturn, self-respecting
landholders, who—in the phrase which a famous American poet, also of
Quaker stock, afterward applied to himself—wore their hats as they
pleased, indoors and out. But the Whittiers were so used to quiet
independence that it never occurred to them to brag of it.
This moral freedom of the New England Quakers, touched as it was with
the humanitarian passion of the later eighteenth century, was the poet’s
spiritual heritage. Judged by material standards, his lot was one of
hardship. The Whittier farm was both rocky and swampy. Only the most
stubborn toil could wring from it a livelihood. In the harsh labor of
the farm the two boys helped as best they could, but John Greenleaf was
slender and delicate, and suffered life-long injury by attempting tasks
beyond his strength. The winters were like iron; underclothing was
almost unknown; the houses were poorly warmed and the churches not at
all; and the food, in farmers’ homes, lacked variety and was ill-cooked.
Though the poet’s body never recovered from these privations of his
youth, the sufferings grew light when, in middle and later life, he
weighed them against the happiness of home affection and the endless
pleasures of a boy’s life out of doors. “The Barefoot Boy,”
“Snow-Bound,” and “In School-Days” tell the story more charmingly and
with more truth than it can ever be told in prose. Few households are
better known to American readers than the inmates of the ancient
homestead under Job’s Hill. In the “Flemish pictures” of the gifted son
we behold the reticent, laborious father, the benignant mother,—like
Goethe’s mother, a natural story-teller,—the gracious maiden aunt, the
uncle with his “prodigies of rod and gun,” the grave elder sister, and
the brilliant Elizabeth. These, with the boyish schoolmaster and the
“half-welcome” casual guest, are still grouped for us before the great
hearth in the ample living-room, waiting
“Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;”—
a bloom that never fades from the memory of the born New Englander.
Indeed, such was Whittier’s fidelity to the impressions made upon him in
his youth, so unerring was his instinct for what was truly
characteristic of the time and place, that these poems written about his
boyhood portray, with a vividness rarely equalled in our literature, not
only a mode of outward life, but a type of thought and feeling which
possesses a permanent significance to all who would understand the
American mind.
It was easier for Whittier, after all, to picture the East Haverhill
homestead and its other inmates than to draw the portrait of himself in
youth. We know that he was tall, frail, clear-colored, with those
wonderful dark “Bachiler eyes” which now prove not to have been true
Bachiler eyes at all. He was shy,—with a painful shyness which lasted
throughout his life,—but he was prouder than a cavalier. Consciousness
of intellectual power came to him early; behind him was a long line of
clean-lived farmers whose lips, although “to caution trained” by Quaker
breeding, could speak decisively when there was need. Poverty had taught
him that respect and sympathy for the poor which is one of the noblest
forms of class-pride. It would have been hard to find in all New England
a country boy whose mind was so perfectly prepared for the visitation of
a master-poet; and the poet, by some special gift of fortune, proved to
be Robert Burns.
The story of that revealing experience is familiar enough: how a “pawky”
wandering Scotchman sang “Bonny Doon” and “Highland Mary” and “Auld Lang
Syne” over his mug of cider in the Whittier kitchen; and then how Joshua
Coffin, the boy’s first schoolmaster, loaned him that copy of Burns
which proved to be his passport to the wonder-world:—
“I saw through all familiar things
The romance underlying;
The joys and griefs that plume the wings
Of Fancy skyward flying.”
He had already scribbled verses upon the beam of his mother’s loom, and
like the boy Alfred Tennyson, only two years younger than himself, in
the far-away Lincolnshire rectory, he had loved to fill his slate with
rhymes. But from the moment that he read Burns this boyish delight in
mere jingling sounds deepened into a sense that he, too, might become a
poet. At sixteen he was composing with extraordinary fluency and with
considerable skill. At eighteen he had written verses which his sister
Mary thought good enough to be printed, and a poem which she sent
surreptitiously to William Lloyd Garrison, the twenty-year-old editor of
the “Newburyport Free Press,” was accepted and published on June 8,
1826. This printing of “The Exile’s Departure” in the poet’s corner of a
struggling local newspaper was a fateful event for Whittier. Everybody
knows the instant and generous interest aroused in the youthful editor:
how he drove out to East Haverhill, unearthed his bashful poet,—who was
at that moment crawling under the barn after a stolen hen’s nest,—and
urged his father to give Greenleaf something better than a district
schooling. “Sir, poetry will not give him bread!” exclaimed John
Whittier, as sternly as Carlyle’s father might have said it. But the
upshot was that the gaunt lad got his term at the Haverhill Academy,
paying his way by making shoes.
He continued to write poems in astonishing profusion, taught school
himself for a term in his native township, then took a final term at the
Academy, and at twenty-one the ways were parting before his feet. A
scheme for the publication of his poems by subscription had failed. His
health seemed too frail for effective farm labor. His ignorance of the
classics, as well as his lack of funds, barred the doors of a college
course. He decided to earn his bread by journalism, and became at the
end of his twenty-first year the editor of “The American Manufacturer”
in Boston. The choice was significant. For three years he had been
heralded as an unlettered “poet,” a sort of local phenomenon who was
possibly destined, as Garrison had prophesied, to rank “among the bards
of his country.” Yet here he was, turning, with a Yankee’s shrewd
facility, to politics and affairs.
He was led, no doubt,—as in the more momentous crisis of 1833, when he
obeyed Garrison’s call and turned Abolitionist,—by an instinct deeper
than any conscious analysis of his powers. He knew that he had what he
called a “knack of rhyming,” and he had learned from Burns to find
material for poetry all about him. Yet he possessed at this time but a
scanty equipment for the long road which a poet must travel. His
physical endowment was impoverished. That full-blooded life of the
senses, which taught Burns and Goethe at fourteen such secrets of human
rapture and dismay, was impossible for the Quaker stripling. He was
color-blind. His ear barely recognized a tune. The bodily sensations of
odor, taste, and touch are scarcely to be felt in his poetry. He was
indeed “no Greek,” as Whitman said of him long afterward; and at the
outset of his career, as at its close, he cared but little for
literature as an art. To conceive of any of the arts as a religion, or
as an embodiment, for sense perception, of the highest potencies of the
human spirit, would have seemed almost blasphemous to this follower of
the “inward light.” He wrote to Lucy Hooper that a long poem, “unless
consecrated to the sacred interests of religion and humanity, would be a
criminal waste of life.” Parthenon and Pantheon were in his eyes less
significant and memorable than Pennsylvania Hall, the Abolitionist
headquarters in Philadelphia. In an editorial in “The Freeman” in 1838,
prefacing a reprint of “A Psalm of Life,” which had just been published
in the New York “Knickerbocker,” Whittier declared: “It is very seldom
that we find an article of poetry so full of excellent philosophy and
COMMON SENSE as the following. We know not who the author may be, but he
or she is no common man or woman. 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.”
One who could utter this amazing verdict upon the “Psalm of Life”
certainly seems less fitted for poetry than for journalism and politics:
and indeed Whittier’s aptitude for affairs, even at twenty-one, was
extraordinary. His political editorials for the “Manufacturer”—a Clay
journal which advocated a protective tariff—were skilfully written from
the first. Subsequent editorial engagements in Haverhill, Hartford, and
Philadelphia, although rendered brief by his wretched health,
nevertheless widened his acquaintance and increased his self-confidence.
His judgment was canny. His knowledge of local conditions, at first in
his native town and county, and afterward throughout New England and the
Eastern States, was singularly exact. He seemed to perceive, as by some
actual visualization, how people were thinking and feeling in
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other communities which he
had observed at first hand; and he employed a correspondingly accurate
and as it were topographical imagination when he wrote of affairs in
Kansas, Paris, or Italy.
Men were never abstractions to him. They were concrete persons, with
ambitions to be tempted, generosities to be wakened, weaknesses to be
utilized. His own county of Essex was then, as now, noted for the
adroitness of its politicians, but at twenty-five John Greenleaf
Whittier could beat the best of them at their own game. He was tireless
in personal persuasion, in secret correspondence, in fighting fire with
fire. He read Burke, and was prompt to apply Burke’s principle: “When
bad men combine, the good should associate.” A Whig himself until the
formation of the Liberty party, he was willing, as his friend Garrison
was not, to compromise on non-essentials for the sake of bringing things
to pass. The hand of a master is revealed in his published letters to
Caleb Cushing and to Henry Clay. It was he who devised the coalitions
which sent Cushing, the Whig, and Rantoul, the Democrat, to Congress,
which made Boutwell governor of Massachusetts and sent Sumner to the
United States Senate. When Sumner was struck down in the Senate chamber
and his indignant constituents held mass meetings to voice their horror,
Whittier was self-controlled enough to declare: “It seems to me to be no
time for the indulgence of mere emotions.... The North is not united for
freedom as the South is for slavery.... We must forget, _forgive_, and
UNITE.” No utterance could be more characteristic of the man. In public
affairs he knew what he wanted to compass, and he was as willing to
lobby or to trade votes as to write an editorial or a lyric, provided
the good cause could be thereby made to prosper. Extremists thought that
he yielded to considerations of mere expediency; but his was rather the
versatility of the born political fighter, who can use more weapons than
one. Underneath all questions of policy, lay his inherited democratic
sympathy with the ordinary man. At the height of his fame he loved to
sit upon a cracker barrel in the grocery store at Amesbury, and talk
politics. “I am a _man_,” he wrote to his biographer Underwood in 1883,
“and not a mere verse-maker.”
This glimpse at the later revelations of his character is essential to
an understanding of the spiritual crisis which confronted him in 1833,
when he was only twenty-six. He loved power, and had already exercised
it in the congenial field of politics. The road to preferment lay that
way. It is true that he had continued to compose abundantly, both in
prose and in verse. His writings were favorably noticed. Yet he saw no
career for himself as a man of letters. “I have done with poetry and
literature,” he wrote to a friend in 1832. Repeated disappointments in
love had darkened his spirit. The death of his father had forced him
back to the old farm to support his mother and sisters. Black care sat
very close behind him. Discouraged, lonely, with ambitions ungratified
and great powers of which he was but half aware, he paused, like some
knight who had lost his way in an enchanted forest. Then blew the
clear unmistakable trumpet call which broke the spell and summoned him
to action. Although an anti-slavery man by native instinct, Whittier
had never given his adherence to the sect of Abolitionists. Now came a
letter from Garrison (March 22, 1833): “My brother, there are upwards
of two million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible
servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of
history. There are one hundred thousand of their offspring kidnapped
annually from their birth. The southern portion of our country is
going down to destruction, physically and morally, with a swift
descent, carrying other portions with her. This, then, is a time for
the philanthropist—any friend of his country, to put forth his
energies, in order to let the oppressed go free, and sustain the
republic. The cause is worthy of Gabriel—yea, the God of hosts places
himself at its head. Whittier, enlist! Your talents, zeal,
influence—all are needed.”[1]
The spirit of Burns, years before, had whispered to the boy that he,
too, had the poet-soul, yet facile versifying was all that had seemed to
come of it, and the young man had turned to politics. Now the living
voice of Garrison called him away from partisan ambitions to enlist in a
doubtful and perilous measure of moral reform. He obeyed, and—so strange
are the mysteries of personality—found in that new service to humanity
not only the inspiration which made him a genuine poet, but the popular
recognition which set the seal upon his fame.
The immediate cost of obedience to his conscience was heavy. The
generation of Americans born since the Civil War look back upon the
Abolitionists as victors after thirty years of agitation, as the
dictators of national policy. Their statues are in public places. Their
theories have prevailed. But in the early thirties they suffered such
ostracism and even martyrdom as only a few historical students now
realize. Churches, colleges, and courts were against them, for reasons
which were adequate enough. They were dangerous members of society.
To-day we endeavor to exclude Anarchists from American soil; the leading
Abolitionists, like the Russian Revolutionists of the present hour,
preached Anarchy in the name of Humanity. Whittier, trained to quietism,
non-resistance, and respect for law, and skilled as he had become in
feeling the pulse of public opinion, knew perfectly well what company he
was henceforth to keep. To be an active Abolitionist was to join the
outcasts.
His first act of allegiance was to write and publish at his own expense
a pamphlet entitled “Justice and Expediency,” which pleaded for
immediate emancipation by peaceful means. In December, 1833, he was a
delegate from Massachusetts at the founding in Philadelphia of the
American Anti-Slavery Society. Whittier was the youngest member. Thirty
years later he wrote to Garrison, who had been his companion upon that
memorable journey: “I am not insensible to literary reputation. I love,
perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but I set a
higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of
1833 than on the title-page of any book.” No words could better
illustrate his devotion to the cause of the slave. Yet he did not
surrender his right of private judgment as to the best means to be
employed. Garrison lost patience, ere long, with Whittier’s willingness
to further the cause by compromise and concession, and the friends
parted, to come together again in later years. The movement for
emancipation needed both men and both methods; but Whittier’s
method—less heroic than Garrison’s, less intolerant than Sumner’s, less
virulent than that of Wendell Phillips—was like Abraham Lincoln’s in its
patience, shrewdness, and sympathy.
Whittier faced hostile mobs with perfect courage, and with a touch of
the humor which is rarely revealed in his writings. When the
Philadelphia rioters looted and burned Pennsylvania Hall, he disguised
himself in a wig and long white overcoat, mingled with the mob, and
saved his own editorial papers. He brought not only courage and finesse,
but high journalistic skill, to the service of the Abolitionists. His
pamphlets, his editorials in the “Freeman,” “Middlesex Standard,”
“National Era,” and other newspapers, were trenchant, caustic, and
far-sighted. Invalidism and the care of his mother’s family kept him
almost constantly at Amesbury, whither he had removed after the sale of
his birthplace in 1836. But Whittier’s was no home-keeping mind, and
there is scarcely a political event of importance, either in this
country or abroad, which is not reflected in his prose and verse
produced during the thirty years ending with the close of the Civil War.
Yet his chief function during the long anti-slavery struggle was that of
chartered poet to the cause. No sooner had he abandoned his dream of
personal advancement than the Byronic melancholy, the weak imitations of
Scott, and the echoes of Mrs. Felicia Hemans disappear from his verse.
He was studying the prose of Milton and Burke, those organ-voices of
English liberty. From Burns and Byron he now caught only the passion for
justice and the common rights of all. He forgot himself. He forgot, for
the time being, those pleasant themes of New England legend and history,
which earlier and later touched his meditative fancy. The cause of negro
emancipation in America—to his mind only one phase of the struggle for a
wider human freedom everywhere—stirred and deepened his whole nature.
There is scarcely a type of political and social verse which is not
represented in his work during this period. He wrote personal lyrics in
praise of living leaders, and mournful salutes to the dead; hymns to be
sung in churches, and campaign songs for the town hall. The touching
lines to “Randolph of Roanoke” are a knightly tribute to an opponent.
The generous and noble “Lost Occasion” was written after Webster’s death
to supplement, rather than to retract, the terrific “Ichabod” addressed
to Webster after his defence of the Fugitive Slave Law. Not since Burns
had any poet dared pillory the clergy in such derisive and indignant
strains as marked “Clerical Oppressors,” “The Pastoral Letter,” and “A
Sabbath Scene.” The selfishness of commercialism, and its “paltry pedler
cries” which exalt “banks” and “tariffs” above the man, have never been
arraigned more powerfully than in “The Pine-Tree” and “Moloch in State
Street.” Such poems are class and party verse of the purest type.
Whittier’s direct contact with the soil and his intense interest in
localities made him also an unequalled interpreter of sectional feeling.
“Massachusetts to Virginia” is perhaps the finest example of this sort
of political verse, but he wrote many similar poems hardly less
striking; and such was the flexibility of Whittier’s imagination when
inspired by the common cause that he expressed not only the mood of the
New England but also of the Middle States, and of that “Wild West,” as
he called it, which was so soon to combine with his “roused North.” Much
of this political poetry was, in the nature of the case, only a sort of
rhymed oratory, scarcely differing, save in rhetorical and metrical
structure, from the speeches of Beecher and Wendell Phillips. Sometimes
it was rhymed journalism, of the kind which Greeley was using in his
sturdy iterative editorials. Much of it, no doubt, has already met the
oblivion which attends most pamphlets or stanzas “for the times.”
Harshness of tone, over-severity in judgment of men and measures,
diffuseness of style, a faulty ear for rhymes, are frequently in
evidence. Yet these blemishes scarcely affected the immediate value of
Whittier’s verse for controversial purposes. Its faults of taste and
form were rightly forgotten in its communicative energy of emotion, its
lambent scorn of evil things, its prophet-like exaltation. Long before
armed conflict ended the debate, Whittier’s poetry had won the attention
not only of his section, but of the entire North, and as the conflict
proceeded his verse sounded more and more clearly that national note
which had been the burden of the great and maligned Webster’s speeches
for union. Only now it was to be a union redeemed. We must be “first
pure, then peaceable,” the Quaker poet had maintained, and the fine
close of his ballad “Barbara Frietchie,” like his “Laus Deo” which “sang
itself” in church while the bells were ringing to celebrate the passing
of slavery, is echoed to-day in the hearts of true Americans everywhere.
To study the chronological order of his poems from “The Exile’s
Departure,” written in 1825, to “Snow-Bound,” written just forty years
later, is to watch the steady broadening and clarifying of Whittier’s
spirit. He found in the community of emotion wrought by a moral and
political crisis the secret of command over his own nature and over the
modes of poetic expression. By 1840 the worst hour of persecution for
the Abolitionists was already past. There were no more mobs for Whittier
to face. He remained, for the most part, quietly at Amesbury. In 1845 he
began to contribute the spirited “Songs of Labor” to the “Democratic
Review,” thus antedating Whitman by ten years in celebrating the
American workingman. By 1847, in the “Proem” written to introduce the
first general collection of his poems, he has already learned to regard
himself as a singer whose nature inclined him to the “old melodious
lays” of Spenser and Sidney, although his lot had fallen in stormy
times:—
“The rigor of a frozen clime,
The harshness of an untaught ear,
The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor’s hurried time,
Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.”
He does not regret his choice, but there is some yearning over the lost
Arcady. In the enforced leisure of his frequent invalidism Whittier read
very widely, and legend and dreamy fancy alternate in his verse with
satirical invective and eloquent humanitarianism. The tragic “Ichabod”
and the mordant irony of “A Sabbath Scene” are followed by the charming
lines “To My Old Schoolmaster.” The poem on Burns, so fresh with “the
dews of boyhood’s morning,” and the ballad of “Maud Muller,” where the
pathos of our human “might have been” is expressed with such artless
adequacy, date from the thrilling year of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. The
Kansas emigrants were actually singing
“We cross the prairie as of old
The Pilgrims crossed the sea”
while Whittier was writing “The Barefoot Boy” in 1855. The “Burial of
Barber” is succeeded by “Mary Garvin.” After the storm, come the bird
voices.
When “The Atlantic Monthly” was founded in 1857, Whittier contributed to
its early numbers, not his timely and impassioned “Moloch in State
Street” and “Le Marais du Cygne,” but rather “The Gift of Tritemius,”
“Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Telling the Bees.” In other words, it was
as a man of letters and not as a controversialist that he joined this
distinguished company of fellow contributors. Whittier was just turning
fifty, in that year. The hair was thin above his noticeably high
forehead; his face and figure spare as in youth; his deep-set dark eyes
still aglow; the lips clean-shaven, nervous, resolute. Like another
invalid, he was destined to long life, but of the thirty-five years then
remaining to him, the succeeding ten were the most fruitful. Aside from
those poems, already mentioned, inspired by the course and outcome of
the War for the Union, his most characteristic productions during this
decade are suggested by such titles as “My Psalm,” “My Playmate,” “The
River Path,” “Cobbler Keezar’s Vision,” “Mountain Pictures,” “Andrew
Rykman’s Prayer,” and “The Eternal Goodness.” These are grave, sweet,
quiet poems, devout and consolatory.
Whittier’s mother died in 1857, and his favorite sister, the gifted
Elizabeth, in 1864, thus leaving the Amesbury house desolate. The poet’s
memories of his birthplace, only six miles away, but now in other hands,
grew increasingly tender in his new loneliness, and he set himself to
sketch, in an idyl longer than it was his wont to write, the scenes and
persons dearest to his boyhood. “A homely picture of old New England
homes,” he called it in a note to Fields, his friendly publisher. The
poem was “Snow-Bound,” and it proved at once to be what it has since
remained, the most popular of his productions; notable, not so much for
sensuous beauty or for any fresh range of thought, as for its vividness,
its fidelity of homely detail, its unerring feeling for the sentiment of
the hearthside.
The surprising profits of “Snow-Bound” made Whittier—to whom, as he
himself said, the doors of magazines and publishing houses had been shut
for twenty years of his life—a well-to-do man henceforward. He never
married. But he prided himself upon never losing a friend, and many
homes were graciously offered to him in his old age. After the marriage
of his niece in 1876, he became for a large part of each year the guest
of his cousins at Oak Knoll, Danvers. In this stately and beautiful
home, and in many friendly houses in Boston, he met frequently some of
the best men and women of his time. His relations with the chief
American authors of his day were cordial, although scarcely intimate.
Most of them gathered in honor of his seventieth birthday at a dinner
given by the publishers of “The Atlantic,” and the subsequent
anniversaries of his birth were very generally noticed. But his life was
essentially a solitary one. Professor Carpenter has noted in his
admirable study of Whittier that his most familiar acquaintances and
correspondents, in his later life, were women. “In old age his was the
point of view, the theory of life, of the woman of gentle tastes,
literary interests, and religious feeling. The best accounts of his
later life are those of Mrs. Claflin and Mrs. Fields, in whose houses he
was often a guest; and they have much to say of his sincere friendliness
and quiet talk, his shy avoidance of notoriety or even of a large group
of people, his keen sense of humor, his tales of his youth, his quaintly
serious comments on life, his sudden comings and goings as inclination
moved, and of the rare occasions when, deeply moved, he spoke of the
great issues of religion with beautiful earnestness and simple faith.
And it is pleasant to think of this farmer’s lad, who had lived for
forty years in all but poverty for the love of God and his fellows,
taking an innocent delight in the luxury of great houses and in the
sheltered life of those protected from hardship and privation. After his
long warfare this was a just reward.”[2]
After the publication of “Snow-Bound” in 1866, Whittier composed nearly
two hundred poems. They celebrate some of his friendships, and indicate
the variety of his reading and his interest in progress both in this
country and in Europe. They describe, with loving accuracy, the
mountains, streams, and shore of New Hampshire, where he usually made
his summer pilgrimages. But few of these later poems, pleasant reading
as they are, affect materially one’s estimate of Whittier’s poetic
powers. His real work was done. Here and there, and notably in the idyl
“The Pennsylvania Pilgrim,” there is a grace and ripeness which indicate
the Indian Summer of his art, with lovely lines written for the “wise
angels” rather than for discordant men. One thinks with a sigh of his
description of himself in “The Tent on the Beach”:—
“And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfil,
Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion-mill.”
But regrets that he could not have lingered in dream-land are doubly
futile; for it was the opinion-mill, after all, that made Whittier a
poet. Life taught him deeper secrets than bookish ease could ever have
imparted. “The simple fact is,” he wrote to E. L. Godkin, “that I cannot
be sufficiently grateful to the Divine Providence that so early called
my attention to the great interests of humanity, saving me from the poor
ambitions and miserable jealousies of a selfish pursuit of literary
reputation.” These words might have been written by one of the saints,
and such, in very truth, was Whittier. Poverty, chastity, and obedience
were his portion in this life. By the road of renunciation he entered
into his spiritual kingdom.
He was not one of the royally endowed, far-shining, “myriad-minded”
poets. He was rustic, provincial; a man of his place and time in
America. It is doubtful if European readers will ever find him richly
suggestive, as they have found Emerson, Poe, and Whitman. But he had a
tenacious hold upon certain realities: first, upon the soil of New
England, of whose history and legend he became such a sympathetic
interpreter; next, upon “the good old cause” of freedom, not only in his
own country but in all places where the age-long and still but half-won
battle was being waged; and finally, upon some permanent objects of
human emotion,—the hill-top, shore and sky, the fireside, the troubled
heart that seeks rest in God. Whittier’s poetry has revealed to
countless readers the patient continuity of human life, its fundamental
unity, and the ultimate peace that hushes its discords. The utter
simplicity of his Quaker’s creed has helped him to interpret the
religious mood of a generation which has grown impatient of formal
doctrine. His hymns are sung by almost every body of Christians, the
world over. It is unlikely that the plain old man who passed quietly
away in a New Hampshire village on September 7, 1892, aged eighty-five,
will ever be reckoned one of the world-poets. But he was, in the best
sense of the word, a world’s-man in heart and in action, a sincere and
noble soul who hated whatever was evil and helped to make the good
prevail; and his verse, fiery and tender and unfeigned, will long be
cherished by his countrymen.
SELECTED POEMS
[Illustration:
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
_From an ambrotype about 1857_
]
THE BAREFOOT BOY
Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy,—
I was once a barefoot boy!
Prince thou art,—the grown-up man
Only is republican.
Let the million-dollared ride!
Barefoot, trudging at his side,
Thou hast more than he can buy
In the reach of ear and eye,—
Outward sunshine, inward joy:
Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!
Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild-flower’s time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;
How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,
And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young,
How the oriole’s nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,
Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine;
Of the black wasp’s cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans!
For, eschewing books and tasks,
Nature answers all he asks;
Hand in hand with her he walks,
Face to face with her he talks,
Part and parcel of her joy,—
Blessings on the barefoot boy!
Oh for boyhood’s time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon,
When all things I heard or saw,
Me, their master, waited for.
I was rich in flowers and trees,
Humming-birds and honey-bees;
For my sport the squirrel played,
Plied the snouted mole his spade;
For my taste the blackberry cone
Purpled over hedge and stone;
Laughed the brook for my delight
Through the day and through the night,
Whispering at the garden wall,
Talked with me from fall to fall;
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
Mine, on bending orchard trees,
Apples of Hesperides!
Still as my horizon grew,
Larger grew my riches too;
All the world I saw or knew
Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
Fashioned for a barefoot boy!
Oh for festal dainties spread,
Like my bowl of milk and bread;
Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,
On the door-stone, gray and rude!
O’er me, like a regal tent,
Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,
Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,
Looped in many a wind-swung fold;
While for music came the play
Of the pied frogs’ orchestra;
And, to light the noisy choir,
Lit the fly his lamp of fire.
I was monarch: pomp and joy
Waited on the barefoot boy!
Cheerily, then, my little man,
Live and laugh, as boyhood can!
Though the flinty slopes be hard,
Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,
Every morn shall lead thee through
Fresh baptisms of the dew;
Every evening from thy feet
Shall the cool wind kiss the heat:
All too soon these feet must hide
In the prison cells of pride,
Lose the freedom of the sod,
Like a colt’s for work be shod,
Made to tread the mills of toil,
Up and down in ceaseless moil:
Happy if their track be found
Never on forbidden ground;
Happy if they sink not in
Quick and treacherous sands of sin.
Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!
IN SCHOOL-DAYS
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.
Within, the master’s desk is seen,
Deep scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife’s carved initial;
The charcoal frescos on its wall;
Its door’s worn sill, betraying
The feet that, creeping slow to school,
Went storming out to playing!
Long years ago a winter sun
Shone over it at setting;
Lit up its western window-panes,
And low eaves’ icy fretting.
It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving,
Of one who still her steps delayed
When all the school were leaving.
For near her stood the little boy
Her childish favor singled:
His cap pulled low upon a face
Where pride and shame were mingled.
Pushing with restless feet the snow
To right and left, he lingered;—
As restlessly her tiny hands
The blue-checked apron fingered.
He saw her lift her eyes; he felt
The soft hand’s light caressing,
And heard the tremble of her voice,
As if a fault confessing.
“I’m sorry that I spelt the word:
I hate to go above you,
Because,”—the brown eyes lower fell,
“Because, you see, I love you!”
Still memory to a gray-haired man
That sweet child-face is showing.
Dear girl! the grasses on her grave
Have forty years been growing!
He lives to learn, in life’s hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her,—because they love him.
THE WHITTIER FAMILY
(FROM “SNOW-BOUND”[3])
All day the gusty north-wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicèd elements,
The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
Beyond the circle of our hearth
No welcome sound of toil or mirth
Unbound the spell, and testified
Of human life and thought outside.
We minded that the sharpest ear
The buried brooklet could not hear,
The music of whose liquid lip
Had been to us companionship,
And, in our lonely life, had grown
To have an almost human tone.
As night drew on, and, from the crest
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,
The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank
From sight beneath the smothering bank,
We piled, with care, our nightly stack
Of wood against the chimney-back,—
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,
And on its top the stout back-stick;
The knotty forestick laid apart,
And filled between with curious art
The ragged brush; then, hovering near,
We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.
The crane and pendent trammels showed,
The Turks’ heads on the andirons glowed;
While childish fancy, prompt to tell
The meaning of the miracle,
Whispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree,
_When fire outdoors burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea_.”
The moon above the eastern wood
Shone at its full; the hill-range stood
Transfigured in the silver flood,
Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,
Dead white, save where some sharp ravine
Took shadow, or the sombre green
Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black
Against the whiteness at their back.
For such a world and such a night
Most fitting that unwarming light,
Which only seemed where’er it fell
To make the coldness visible.
Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.
What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.
O Time and Change!—with hair as gray
As was my sire’s that winter day,
How strange it seems, with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on!
Ah, brother! only I and thou
Are left of all that circle now,—
The dear home faces whereupon
That fitful firelight paled and shone.
Henceforward, listen as we will,
The voices of that hearth are still;
Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,
Those lighted faces smile no more.
We tread the paths their feet have worn,
We sit beneath their orchard trees,
We hear, like them, the hum of bees
And rustle of the bladed corn;
We turn the pages that they read,
Their written words we linger o’er,
But in the sun they cast no shade,
No voice is heard, no sign is made,
No step is on the conscious floor!
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust,
(Since He who knows our need is just,)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress-trees!
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!
We sped the time with stories old,
Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told,
Or stammered from our school-book lore
“The Chief of Gambia’s golden shore.”
How often since, when all the land
Was clay in Slavery’s shaping hand,
As if a far-blown trumpet stirred
The languorous sin-sick air, I heard:
“_Does not the voice of reason cry,
Claim the first right which Nature gave,
From the red scourge of bondage fly,
Nor deign to live a burdened slave!_”
Our father rode again his ride
On Memphremagog’s wooded side;
Sat down again to moose and samp
In trapper’s hut and Indian camp;
Lived o’er the old idyllic ease
Beneath St. François’ hemlock-trees;
Again for him the moonlight shone
On Norman cap and bodiced zone;
Again he heard the violin play
Which led the village dance away,
And mingled in its merry whirl
The grandam and the laughing girl.
Or, nearer home, our steps he led
Where Salisbury’s level marshes spread
Mile-wide as flies the laden bee;
Where merry mowers, hale and strong,
Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along
The low green prairies of the sea.
We shared the fishing off Boar’s Head,
And round the rocky Isles of Shoals
The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals;
The chowder on the sand-beach made,
Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot,
With spoons of clam-shell from the pot.
We heard the tales of witchcraft old,
And dream and sign and marvel told
To sleepy listeners as they lay
Stretched idly on the salted hay,
Adrift along the winding shores,
When favoring breezes deigned to blow
The square sail of the gundelow
And idle lay the useless oars.
Our mother, while she turned her wheel
Or run the new-knit stocking-heel,
Told how the Indian hordes came down
At midnight on Cocheco town,
And how her own great-uncle bore
His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.
Recalling, in her fitting phrase,
So rich and picturesque and free,
(The common unrhymed poetry
Of simple life and country ways,)
The story of her early days,—
She made us welcome to her home;
Old hearths grew wide to give us room;
We stole with her a frightened look
At the gray wizard’s conjuring-book,
The fame whereof went far and wide
Through all the simple country side;
We heard the hawks at twilight play,
The boat-horn on Piscataqua,
The loon’s weird laughter far away;
We fished her little trout-brook, knew
What flowers in wood and meadow grew,
What sunny hillsides autumn-brown
She climbed to shake the ripe nuts down,
Saw where in sheltered cove and bay
The ducks’ black squadron anchored lay,
And heard the wild-geese calling loud
Beneath the gray November cloud.
Then, haply, with a look more grave,
And soberer tone, some tale she gave
From painful Sewel’s ancient tome,
Beloved in every Quaker home,
Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom,
Or Chalkley’s Journal, old and quaint,—
Gentlest of skippers, rare sea-saint!—
Who, when the dreary calms prevailed,
And water-butt and bread-cask failed,
And cruel, hungry eyes pursued
His portly presence mad for food,
With dark hints muttered under breath
Of casting lots for life or death,
Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies,
To be himself the sacrifice.
Then, suddenly, as if to save
The good man from his living grave,
A ripple on the water grew,
A school of porpoise flashed in view.
“Take, eat,” he said, “and be content;
These fishes in my stead are sent
By Him who gave the tangled ram
To spare the child of Abraham.”