He was a delegate to the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833); he repeatedly forced abolitionist pledges from unwilling candidates; he helped secure Sumner's nomination to the Senate; he was instrumental in importing George Thompson from England for the cause, and he was several times in great personal danger. He ceased to write imitations of Byron, Moore and Scott, and commenced to pour out a stream of anti-slavery poems which circulated from Maine to Kansas. In 1843, with "Lays of My Home and Other Poems," he began the publication of poems of country life, of New England traditions, and of nature. This field he found more and more engrossing. Whittier continued, however, to take an active interest in politics up to the Civil War. During that struggle he wrote little, but among his few productions is "Barbara Frietchie" (1863), the most famous ballad of the time. Once the strain was over, "Snowbound" appeared in 1866, "The Tent on the Beach" in 1867, "Among the Hills" in 1869, "Ballads of New England" in 1870. These contain his maturest work. He also wrote much in prose. After the death, in 1864, of his sister, Elizabeth, who was to him what Dorothy Wordsworth was to her brother, Whittier's life became uneventful. Like Tennyson's, his old age was prolific. A dinner on his seventieth birthday was the occasion of a great outburst of national appreciation. Whittier died September 7, 1892. I. Texts. The complete works are in the Riverside Edition, 7 vols. (I-IV, poetical works; V-VII, prose), Houghton, Mifflin Co. The Standard Library Edition includes Pickard's Life. The best one-volume edition of the poems is the Cambridge Edition, Houghton, Mifflin Co. II. Biography. Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, by S. T. Pickard, 2 vols., 1895. The best brief biography is by G. R. Carpenter (American Men of Letters). There is also one by T. W. Higginson (English Men of Letters). III. Criticism. E. C. Stedman's Poets of America; Bliss Perry, Whittier for To-day, in Park Street Papers; Barrett Wendell, Stelligeri and Other Essays; George E. Woodberry, Makers of Literature. The Mind of Whittier, by Chauncey J. Hawkins (New York, 1904), is an interesting study of Whittier's religion. What it meant to Whittier to join the abolitionists is hard for us to realize. In the thirties, Garrison's followers were utterly despised and rejected of men. Some idea of the temper of the times is gained from the fact that Dr. Reuben Crandall, of Washington, was thrown into jail in the capital of the nation, and kept there until his health was destroyed, all because he had given a copy of "Justice and Expediency" to a fellow doctor. In 1835, while Samuel J. May was addressing an anti-slavery 1 Commemorated by Whittier in his poem "Astræa at the Capitol." meeting in the Christian church of Haverhill, "a heavily loaded cannon had been dragged near the church and at the same time the wooden steps at the doors had been pulled away. The plan of the miscreants was to break the windows and discharge the cannon, thus causing a rush to the doors, and, the steps being removed, the audience would have been precipitated several feet; limbs would have been broken, and perhaps lives lost in the panic." A few days later, Whittier and George Thompson were driven out of Concord by mob violence. In October of that year, "men of property and standing" united to drag Garrison through the streets of Boston with a halter round his neck. In 1837 Whittier was driven out of Newburyport by a shower of rotten eggs; in 1838 the office of the Pennsylvania Freeman, of which he was then editor, was sacked and burned by a mob. During all this period, as the poet says, "my pronounced views on slavery made my name too unpopular for publishers' uses." 1 Whittier's "mind was formed, his imagination kindled," says Bliss Perry, "and his hand perfected amid the fiery pressure of events." The struggle changed the whole tenor of his verse. In considering his place as a poet, we may put aside practically everything written before 1834. It was then he began to denounce slavery in rhyme, to celebrate some martyr to the cause, or pen a poetic obituary, or to phrase a trenchant political argument in verse. Strange as it seems to us, verse, for sixty years of the 19th century, was the most powerful vehicle for political argument. As Bryant's youthful satire on the embargo act (written at thirteen) ran to two editions, so immigrants went into Kansas chanting We cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, Whittier was one of the last and greatest of our rhyming pamphleteers. Of the anti-slavery poems, the writer himself preserved less than a hundred, and, even of these, the greater part are occasional and transitory. In their rhetorical appeal they resemble his "Songs of Labor" and Elliott's "Corn Law Rhymes.' About ten stand out as worth preserving, among them the awful denunciation of "Ichabod," the stern thunder of "Expostulation," "Massachusetts to Virginia," and "Laus Deo," the final paan. In this list should be included one of the finest pieces of irony in American literature, the "Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church South." In these poems, the emotions of the time live forever. The rest of Whittier's work falls into three general classes-ballads and narrative verse, poems of country life and nature, and religious poems. In the ballads, Whittier's instinct was thoroughly right, so that Stedman calls him "our most natural balladist." Yet the attempt to displace Longfellow as a narrative poet in Whittier's favor is an effort to exile Aristides. At his best-in "Barclay of Ury" (excepting the last four stanzas), or "Skipper Ireson's Ride"-he sometimes equalled Longfellow, but such 1 For studies of the abolition movement see Harriet Martineau, "The Martyr Age in America" for a contemporary report; and Henry Wilson, "History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America," 8th ed., Vol. I, especially chaps. xvi, xvii, xx, xxi, xxvii; also the life of Garrison by his children (New York, 1885), 2 vols. poems are rare. If Longfellow wrote "The Wreck of the Hesperus" without making a trip to the reef of Norman's Woe, in "Barbara Frietchie" Whittier has involved himself in a succession of military absurdities. Moreover, Whittier's Indian stories are all failures, and, structurally or as narrative, "The Tent on the Beach" cannot compare with "Tales of the Wayside Inn." Truth to tell, Whittier was too diffuse to write good narrative, especially good ballad narrative. He lacked a sense of form; he lacked dramatic power; he lacked, above all, Longfellow's literary tact, the ability to estimate his material. Many of Whittier's ballads seem almost on the verge of being vivid and real, but, somehow, they never quite succeed. characteristic that in "Miriam" the setting occupies 258 lines, and the incident, itself loosely told, only 206. Moreover, Whittier's attempt to moralize everything (as in "The Three Bells" and "Conductor Bradley"), recalls the misplaced ingenuity of the "Gesta Romanorum." To our taste, most of his narrative is insipid. As the poet of New England country life, Whittier fares better. Stedman is especially happy in calling him the Teniers of American verse. "Snowbound," "The Barefoot Boy," and "Telling the Bees" are as genuine as Crabbe, or the Scotch parts of "The Cotter's Saturday Night," or "The Ole Swimmin' Hole," and they appeal to the same audiences. Perhaps the farm-life of Haverhill was not the farm-life of South Dakota or Texas, but it was a life which everybody understands and appreciates and which Whittier has fixed imperishably. The charm of such verse lies in its very simplicity, in the mood of tender reminiscence with which it is told. Yet it is characteristic that he missed the obverse of the picture, those tragedies of lonely life which Mr. Robert Frost, working in the same field, has powerfully depicted. Unlike Burns, Whittier is narrowed by his rusticity. Whittier is less successful as a nature poet. It is commonly supposed that the farmer-poet is the most successful nature-poet, but such, in the nature of things, cannot be. The farmer is too close to his fields to see them. The successful nature-poet is either a philosopher, like Wordsworth, or a painter, like Tennyson. Poets must either interpret landscapes or view them in a Claude Lorraine glass, and Whittier did neither. He was usually content with a catalogue. He was "color-blind and tonedeaf," his landscapes lack distinctness, and page after page of his natureverse slips through the mind with the deadly vacuity of five-finger exercises. He was as incapable of writing as he was of writing By the long wash of Australasian seas Rolled round in earth's diurnal course Exception should be made, however, of "The Last Walk in Autumn," which, if it does not paint a landscape, at least conveys a mood. Whittier's religion "is the life of his genius, out of which flow his ideas of earthly and heavenly content." His poems have furnished hymns of wide popularity. Curiously enough, he made rabid attacks on the clergy, as in "The Pastoral Letter," and his denunciation of Pius Ninth is as strong as Swinburne's "Diræ." Yet poems like "The Eternal Goodness," and lines like The healing of His seamless dress Is by our beds of pain; We touch Him in life's throng and press, And we are whole again, have in them the benediction of a vesper organ. They satisfied the mood of his own times; it is less likely that they will satisfy ours. Whittier attempted no philosophical grasp of things; there is nothing in his faith, however beautifully expressed, for the mind to bite on, and readers are less and less inclined to turn to Whittier for spiritual consolation. In general, it must be confessed that Whittier lacked many essential elements of a great poet. "Point, decoration, and other features of modern verse," says Stedman, his most sympathetic apologist, "are scarcely characteristic of Whittier." He was deficient in sensuous beauty, in passion, in color, in thought. He wrote too fluently and too much. He lacked a sense of form; he was careless in workmanship; too often he felt called upon to write a poem when he did not have a poem to write. Frequently he was merely rhetorical. And even as a moralist his ideas were narrow. Yet he gave us one unequalled picture of New England country life; a handful of stirring appeals for action; a dozen ballads, and a slight quantity of lasting religious verse. Like Longfellow, he is read by the children, and his fame is therefore secure. In the American pantheon he will always hold an honorable place; but the trend of development is away from him, and it seems probable that he will sink to the safe dignity of a minor sectional poet. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891) J. Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1819. He inherited from his father, the Rev. Charles Lowell, his pronounced ethical impulses, and from his mother his imaginative temperament and his love of poetry and music. His schooling included a stiff drill in Latin and French. He was graduated from Harvard in 1838 after a brilliant but mildly erratic career, during which he showed marked literary promise. He took his law degree in 1840, but did not practise, dividing his energies for the next several years between reform activities, including two editorships, and writing poetry, of which he published volumes in 1841 and 1844. The agitation over the annexation of Texas drew from Lowell the indignant protest of "The Present Crisis" (written 1844), and his devotion to an unpopular cause became not only as whole-souled as Whittier's, but possibly cost him quite as much. The next eight years were the first great productive period in his life, culminating with 1848, in which were published "Poems, Second Series," the first group of "Biglow Papers," "A Fable for Critics," "The Vision of Sir Launfal," and several prose essays. Following on a series of lectures on poetry at the Lowell Institute in Boston, 1854-1855, he was called to succeed Longfellow as Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, a position which he held, with brief absences, until 1877. Although a close and enthusiastic scholar, he combined this work with equally important responsibilities, for he was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly (18571861), and, with Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of The North American Review (1864-1872). During these years appeared many of his most significant essays on public affairs, as well as the volumes of poetry and prose, "The Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Willows and Other Poems," "Among My Books," and "My Study Windows." From 1877 to 1885 he was Minister first to Spain and then to England. He continued writing, chiefly in prose, until the end of his life in 1891, publishing "Democracy, and Other Addresses" (1886), "Political Essays,' and "Heartsease and Rue" (1888), and leaving manuscripts which were assembled in the following volumes after his death: "Latest Literary Essays and Addresses" (1891), "The Old English Dramatists" (1892), "Letters" (two volumes, edited by C. E. Norton, 1892), and “Last Poems" (1895). I. Texts. Complete Works, Riverside Edition, II vols., of which 4 contain the poems; Cambridge Edition of Poems, I vol. II. Biography. Letters of Lowell, edited by C. E..Norton, 2 vols.; Life, H. E. Scudder, 2 vols.; Life, Ferris Greenslet; Lowell and His Friends, E. E. Hale; Life, E. E. Hale, Jr. (Beacon Biography Series). III. Criticism. American Prose Masters, W. C. Brownell; Literary Leaders of America, Richard Burton; Essays in London and Elsewhere, Henry James; International Perspective in Criticism, Gustav Pollak; Excursions in Criticism, William Watson; Makers of Literature, G. E. Woodberry. The Critic, Vol. IX, p. 86, an article by Theodore Roosevelt. Any discussion of Lowell's work begins almost instinctively with his personality. Like Dr. Johnson's and Charles Lamb's, his individuality was more vivid than anything he wrote, and in this respect he is unique in American letters. To one who reads the volumes of Norton, Lowell moves across the stage of our literature like a being from another world, scattering essays and epigrams as he goes. Or, to change the figure, he is like a transplanted shrub, perhaps a little exotic and precious; as though an article from the Edinburgh Review should be printed without comment in the Saturday Evening Post. It is at once incredible and hopeful that in the welter of inanity which then passed in America for criticism, the essay on Chaucer could have been written by a New Englander, and, being written, could get itself read. Lowell was at once an essayist, a critic, a poet, a college professor, a bibliophile, a philologist, a politician, a diplomat, an editor, an orator, a |