frequent from Alice and Phoebe Cary, Lucy Larcom, Grace Greenwood, and Gail Hamilton. Whittier wrote more than eighty poems for it, including "Maud Muller ", "Ichabod ", and a great deal of prose work, including "Literary Recreations", and 66 Margart Smith's Journal". This last was the best of his prose work, but is of small value compared with his poems. ΧΙ Kennedy divides his poems into four periods: the first introductory, 1830-33; the second, storm and stress, 1833-53; the third transition, 1853-60; and the fourth, religious and artistic repose, 1860 to his death. His early poems are not remarkable. That on "The Deity", the first which Garrison published for him, is only a paraphrase of the passage from the 19th chapter of the First Book of Kings, in which the forceful poetry of the original is diluted. His poetic instinct instead of springing forth full-armed, like Bryant's, was developed slowly. His Poetry a Means, not an End 339 XII His anti-slavery verses were abundant. As May says: From 1832 to the close of our dreadful war in 1865 his harp of liberty was never hung up: not an important occasion escaped him; every significant incident drew from his heart some pertinent, and often very impressive or rousing verses. Kennedy says: There is nothing in American literature, unless it be the anti-slavery papers of Thoreau, which equals the sevenfold heated moral indignation of Whittier's poems on slavery; there is a wild melody in them like that of highland pibrochs; now plaintively and piteously pleading, and now burning with passion, irony, satire, scorn; here glowing with tropical imagery, as in "Toussaint L'Ouverture", and "The Slaves of Martinique", and there rising into lofty moral atmospheres of faith when all seemed dark and hopeless*. XIII All this time Whittier regarded poetry as a means, not an end. Mr. Underwood says, "His aim had been to reach the hearts of men, and poetic diction had been only the feathering of the arrows." Stedman says: His imperfections were those of his time and class, Browning was a prom The two poets were inent sufferer in this respect. so much alike, with their indifference to method and taste, as to suggest the question (especially in view of the subaltern reform-verse-makers) whether advocates of causes, and other people of great moral zeal, are not relatively deficient in artistic conscientiousness, and in what may be called æsthetic recitude. There came a period when Whittier's verse was composed solely with poetic intent and after a less careless fashion. It is chiefly that portion, written from 1860 onward, that has secured him a more than local reputation®. XIV Yet, as the writer of the obituary in the New York Nation pointed out, the strong tonic of the anti-slavery agitation gave a training in directness, simplicity, and genuineness. It taught him to shorten his sword, and to produce strong effects by common means. Two of these poems, "Ichabod" and "The Lost Ocasion", refer to Daniel Webster, whose action upon slavery in the United States senate brought grief to his Massachusetts friends. "Ichabod " (1851) has been called the purest and profoundest moral lament in modern literature, whether American or European, the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain on the battlefields of heaven. XV ICHABOD ! So fallen so lost! the light withdrawn The glory from his gray hairs gone Revile him not-the Tempter hath A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage, When he who might Have lighted up and led his age, Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark Fiend goaded, down the endless dark, Let not the land once proud of him, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, But let its humbled sons, instead, A long lament, as for the dead, Of all we loved and honored, nought A fallen angel's pride of thought, All else is gone; from those great eyes The soul has fled : When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead! Then pay the reverence of old days Walk backward, with averted gaze, |