If I consider the intensity of imagination and emotional power, Whittier ranks higher as a poet than Longfellow. Taking him at his best and selecting a score of poems from the hundreds that he wrote, Whittier is assuredly one of the greater poets of America, with a virility that can only be matched by the rarer ballad writers of English Literature.

The strength of his imaginative sympathies though, does not make him superior than other American poets, but his artistic skill is not commensurate with his native endowment. It is only by fine flashes here and there in the considerable body of his verse that we realize that his art matches his inspiration.

Sometimes, as in that lovely idyll, Snowbound or in the passionate lament over Daniel Webster’s attitude towards the Abolitionist problem, Whittier rises to the heights of great poetry. But his emotions, though intense, have little plasticity; his imagination, though deep, is narrow and restricted.

Given a cause that touched him to the quick, like Anti-Slavery or certain aspects of New England life, he can rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, he has written a great deal of verse that though workmanlike and agreeable, lacks distinction and fire; and has neither the simple, sentimental charm of Longfellow’s ordinary verse nor the intellectual suggestiveness that reconciles one to some extent to the rough artistry of Emerson and Thoreau.

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Snowbound, Randolph of Roanoke, Moloch in State Street, Chabot, Barbara Ritchie, Maud Muller, The Henchman, The Barefoot Boy, Taking the Bees and Proem are poems, full of tenderness, strength and passionate scorn for the tyrant and the base.

Here is an illustration:

Ichabot

So fallen! So lost! the light withdrawn

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Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

For evermore!

Revile him not, -the Tempter hath

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A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall.

O, dumb be passion’s stormy rage,

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When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age,

Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark

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A bright soul driven

Friend-goaded, down the endless dark,

From hope and heaven!

Let not the land once proud of him

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Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim

Dishonored brow.

But let its humbled sons, instead,

From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead,

In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, 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 list, when honor 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!

We may add also the beautiful hymn, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, than which no lovelier expression of the Quaker spirit exists in our sacred verse.

“Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

Till all our strivings cease

Take from our souls the strain and stress;

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Thy Peace.

Breathe through the pulses of desire

Thy coolness and Thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, its heats expire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

0 Still small voice of calm”.

Poem:

(To introduce the first collected edition of his poems)

I love the old melodious lays

Which softly melt the ages through,

The songs of Spencer’s golden days,

Arcadian Sidney’s silvery phrase,

Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew.

Yet vainly in my quiet hours

To breathe their marvelous notes I try;

I feel them, as the leaves and flowers

In silence feel the dewy showers,

And drink with glad, still lips the blessing of the sky.

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.

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,

No rounded art the lack supplies;

Unskilled the subtle lines to trace,

Or softer shades of Nature’s face,

I view her common forms with unannounced 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.

Yet here at least an earnest sense

Of human right and weal is shown;

A hate of tyranny intense,

And hearty in its vehemence,

As if my brother’s pain and sorrow were my own.

O freedom! if to me belong

Nor mighty Milton’s gift divine,

Nor Marvell’s wit and graceful song,

Still with a love as deep and strong

As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine.