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Title: John Greenleaf Whittier
A sketch of his life
Author: Bliss Perry
Release Date: January 19, 2022 [eBook #67202]
Language: English
Produced by: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER ***
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.”
Our uncle, innocent of books,
Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,
The ancient teachers never dumb
Of Nature’s unhoused lyceum.
In moons and tides and weather wise,
He read the clouds as prophecies,
And foul or fair could well divine,
By many an occult hint and sign,
Holding the cunning-warded keys
To all the woodcraft mysteries;
Himself to Nature’s heart so near
That all her voices in his ear
Of beast or bird had meanings clear,
Like Apollonius of old,
Who knew the tales the sparrows told,
Or Hermes who interpreted
What the sage cranes of Nilus said;
A simple, guileless, childlike man,
Content to live where life began;
Strong only on his native grounds,
The little world of sights and sounds
Whose girdle was the parish bounds,
Whereof his fondly partial pride
The common features magnified,
As Surrey hills to mountains grew
In White of Selborne’s loving view,—
He told how teal and loon he shot,
And how the eagle’s eggs he got,
The feats on pond and river done,
The prodigies of rod and gun;
Till, warming with the tales he told,
Forgotten was the outside cold,
The bitter wind unheeded blew,
From ripening corn the pigeons flew,
The partridge drummed i’ the wood, the mink
Went fishing down the river-brink.
In fields with bean or clover gay,
The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
Peered from the doorway of his cell;
The muskrat plied the mason’s trade,
And tier by tier his mud-walls laid;
And from the shagbark overhead
The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell.
Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
And voice in dreams I see and hear,—
The sweetest woman ever Fate
Perverse denied a household mate,
Who, lonely, homeless, not the less
Found peace in love’s unselfishness,
And welcome wheresoe’er she went,
A calm and gracious element,
Whose presence seemed the sweet income
And womanly atmosphere of home,—
Called up her girlhood memories,
The huskings and the apple-bees,
The sleigh-rides and the summer sails,
Weaving through all the poor details
And homespun warp of circumstance
A golden woof-thread of romance.
For well she kept her genial mood
And simple faith of maidenhood;
Before her still a cloud-land lay,
The mirage loomed across her way;
The morning dew, that dries so soon
With others, glistened at her noon;
Through years of toil and soil and care,
From glossy tress to thin gray hair,
All unprofaned she held apart
The virgin fancies of the heart.
Be shame to him of woman born
Who hath for such but thought of scorn.
There, too, our elder sister plied
Her evening task the stand beside;
A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice.
O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best
That Heaven itself could give thee,—rest,
Rest from all bitter thoughts and things!
How many a poor one’s blessing went
With thee beneath the low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings!
As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Against the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed in the unfading green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago:—
The chill weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where’er I went
With dark eyes full of love’s content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June’s unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life’s late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
MY PLAYMATE[4]
The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,
Their song was soft and low;
The blossoms in the sweet May wind
Were falling like the snow.
The blossoms drifted at our feet,
The orchard birds sang clear;
The sweetest and the saddest day
It seemed of all the year.
For, more to me than birds or flowers,
My playmate left her home,
And took with her the laughing spring,
The music and the bloom.
She kissed the lips of kith and kin,
She laid her hand in mine:
What more could ask the bashful boy
Who fed her father’s kine?
She left us in the bloom of May:
The constant years told o’er
Their seasons with as sweet May morns,
But she came back no more.
I walk, with noiseless feet, the round
Of uneventful years;
Still o’er and o’er I sow the spring
And reap the autumn ears.
She lives where all the golden year
Her summer roses blow;
The dusky children of the sun
Before her come and go.
There haply with her jewelled hands
She smooths her silken gown,—
No more the homespun lap wherein
I shook the walnuts down.
The wild grapes wait us by the brook,
The brown nuts on the hill,
And still the May-day flowers make sweet
The woods of Follymill.
The lilies blossom in the pond,
The bird builds in the tree,
The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill
The slow song of the sea.
I wonder if she thinks of them,
And how the old time seems,—
If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
Are sounding in her dreams.
I see her face, I hear her voice;
Does she remember mine?
And what to her is now the boy
Who fed her father’s kine?
What cares she that the orioles build
For other eyes than ours,—
That other hands with nuts are filled,
And other laps with flowers?
O playmate in the golden time!
Our mossy seat is green,
Its fringing violets blossom yet,
The old trees o’er it lean.
The winds so sweet with birch and fern
A sweeter memory blow;
And there in spring the veeries sing
The song of long ago.
And still the pines of Ramoth wood
Are moaning like the sea,—
The moaning of the sea of change
Between myself and thee!
TELLING THE BEES[5]
Here is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
And the poplars tall;
And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,
And the white horns tossing above the wall.
There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,
Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
And the same brook sings of a year ago.
There’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.
I mind me how with a lover’s care
From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.
Since we parted, a month had passed,—
To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.
I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain
Of light through the leaves,
The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,
The bloom of her roses under the eaves.
Just the same as a month before,—
The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—
Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!
Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps
For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
The fret and the pain of his age away.”
But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
Sung to the bees stealing out and in.
And the song she was singing ever since
In my ear sounds on:—
“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”
BURNS[6]
ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM
No more these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover;
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
The minstrel and the heather,
The deathless singer and the flowers
He sang of live together.
Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns!
The moorland flower and peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and pleasant!
The gray sky wears again its gold
And purple of adorning,
And manhood’s noonday shadows hold
The dews of boyhood’s morning:
The dews that washed the dust and soil
From off the wings of pleasure,
The sky that flecked the ground of toil
With golden threads of leisure.
I call to mind the summer day,
The early harvest mowing,
The sky with sun and clouds at play,
And flowers with breezes blowing.
I hear the blackbird in the corn,
The locust in the haying;
And, like the fabled hunter’s horn,
Old tunes my heart is playing.
How oft that day, with fond delay,
I sought the maple’s shadow,
And sang with Burns the hours away,
Forgetful of the meadow!
Bees hummed, birds twittered, overhead
I heard the squirrels leaping,
The good dog listened while I read,
And wagged his tail in keeping.
I watched him while in sportive mood
I read “_The Twa Dogs’_” story,
And half believed he understood
The poet’s allegory.
Sweet day, sweet songs! The golden hours
Grew brighter for that singing,
From brook and bird and meadow flowers
A dearer welcome bringing.
New light on home-seen Nature beamed,
New glory over Woman;
And daily life and duty seemed
No longer poor and common.
I woke to find the simple truth
Of fact and feeling better
Than all the dreams that held my youth
A still repining debtor:
That Nature gives her handmaid, Art,
The themes of sweet discoursing;
The tender idyls of the heart
In every tongue rehearsing.
Why dream of lands of gold and pearl,
Of loving knight and lady,
When farmer boy and barefoot girl
Were wandering there already?
I saw through all familiar things
The romance underlying;
The joys and griefs that plume the wings
Of Fancy skyward flying.
I saw the same blithe day return,
The same sweet fall of even,
That rose on wooded Craigie-burn,
And sank on crystal Devon.
I matched with Scotland’s heathery hills
The sweetbrier and the clover;
With Ayr and Doon, my native rills,
Their wood hymns chanting over.
O’er rank and pomp, as he had seen,
I saw the Man uprising;
No longer common or unclean,
The child of God’s baptizing!
With clearer eyes I saw the worth
Of life among the lowly;
The Bible at his Cotter’s hearth
Had made my own more holy.
And if at times an evil strain,
To lawless love appealing,
Broke in upon the sweet refrain
Of pure and healthful feeling,
It died upon the eye and ear,
No inward answer gaining;
No heart had I to see or hear
The discord and the staining.
Let those who never erred forget
His worth, in vain bewailings;
Sweet Soul of Song! I own my debt
Uncancelled by his failings!
Lament who will the ribald line
Which tells his lapse from duty,
How kissed the maddening lips of wine
Or wanton ones of beauty;
But think, while falls that shade between
The erring one and Heaven,
That he who loved like Magdalen,
Like her may be forgiven.
Not his the song whose thunderous chime
Eternal echoes render;
The mournful Tuscan’s haunted rhyme,
And Milton’s starry splendor!
But who his human heart has laid
To Nature’s bosom nearer?
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
To love a tribute dearer?
Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!
The very moonlight of his song
Is warm with smiles and blushes!
Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So “Bonnie Doon” but tarry;
Blot out the Epic’s stately rhyme,
But spare his Highland Mary!
THE SHIP-BUILDERS
The sky is ruddy in the east,
The earth is gray below,
And, spectral in the river-mist,
The ship’s white timbers show.
Then let the sounds of measured stroke
And grating saw begin;
The broad-axe to the gnarlèd oak,
The mallet to the pin!
Hark! roars the bellows, blast on blast,
The sooty smithy jars,
And fire-sparks, rising far and fast,
Are fading with the stars.
All day for us the smith shall stand
Beside that flashing forge;
All day for us his heavy hand
The groaning anvil scourge.
From far-off hills, the panting team
For us is toiling near;
For us the raftsmen down the stream
Their island barges steer.
Rings out for us the axe-man’s stroke
In forests old and still;
For us the century-circled oak
Falls crashing down his hill.
Up! up! in nobler toil than ours
No craftsmen bear a part:
We make of Nature’s giant powers
The slaves of human Art.
Lay rib to rib and beam to beam,
And drive the treenails free;
Nor faithless joint nor yawning seam
Shall tempt the searching sea!
Where’er the keel of our good ship
The sea’s rough field shall plough;
Where’er her tossing spars shall drip
With salt-spray caught below;
That ship must heed her master’s beck,
Her helm obey his hand,
And seamen tread her reeling deck
As if they trod the land.
Her oaken ribs the vulture-beak
Of Northern ice may peel;
The sunken rock and coral peak
May grate along her keel;
And know we well the painted shell
We give to wind and wave,
Must float, the sailor’s citadel,
Or sink, the sailor’s grave!
Ho! strike away the bars and blocks,
And set the good ship free!
Why lingers on these dusty rocks
The young bride of the sea?
Look! how she moves adown the grooves,
In graceful beauty now!
How lowly on the breast she loves
Sinks down her virgin prow!
God bless her! wheresoe’er the breeze
Her snowy wing shall fan,
Aside the frozen Hebrides,
Or sultry Hindostan!
Where’er, in mart or on the main,
With peaceful flag unfurled,
She helps to wind the silken chain
Of commerce round the world!
Speed on the ship! But let her bear
No merchandise of sin,
No groaning cargo of despair
Her roomy hold within;
No Lethean drug for Eastern lands,
Nor poison-draught for ours;
But honest fruits of toiling hands
And Nature’s sun and showers.
Be hers the Prairie’s golden grain,
The Desert’s golden sand,
The clustered fruits of sunny Spain,
The spice of Morning-land!
Her pathway on the open main
May blessings follow free,
And glad hearts welcome back again
Her white sails from the sea!
SKIPPER IRESON’S RIDE[7]
Of all the rides since the birth of time,
Told in story or sung in rhyme,—
On Apuleius’s Golden Ass,
Or one-eyed Calender’s horse of brass,
Witch astride of a human back,
Islam’s prophet on Al-Borák,—
The strangest ride that ever was sped
Was Ireson’s, out from Marblehead!
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
Body of turkey, head of owl,
Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl,
Feathered and ruffled in every part,
Skipper Ireson stood in the cart.
Scores of women, old and young,
Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue,
Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane,
Shouting and singing the shrill refrain:
“Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt
By the women o’ Morble’ead!”
Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips,
Girls in bloom of cheek and lips,
Wild-eyed, free-limbed, such as chase
Bacchus round some antique vase,
Brief of skirt, with ankles bare,
Loose of kerchief and loose of hair,
With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns’ twang,
Over and over the Mænads sang:
“Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt
By the women o’ Morble’ead!”
Small pity for him!—He sailed away
From a leaking ship in Chaleur Bay,—
Sailed away from a sinking wreck,
With his own town’s-people on her deck!
“Lay by! lay by!” they called to him.
Back he answered, “Sink or swim!
Brag of your catch of fish again!”
And off he sailed through the fog and rain!
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
Fathoms deep in dark Chaleur
That wreck shall lie forevermore.
Mother and sister, wife and maid,
Looked from the rocks of Marblehead
Over the moaning and rainy sea,—
Looked for the coming that might not be!
What did the winds and the sea-birds say
Of the cruel captain who sailed away?—
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
Through the street, on either side,
Up flew windows, doors swung wide;
Sharp-tongued spinsters, old wives gray,
Treble lent the fish-horn’s bray.
Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound,
Hulks of old sailors run aground,
Shook head, and fist, and hat, and cane,
And cracked with curses the hoarse refrain:
“Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt
By the women o’ Morble’ead!”
Sweetly along the Salem road
Bloom of orchard and lilac showed.
Little the wicked skipper knew
Of the fields so green and the sky so blue.
Riding there in his sorry trim,
Like an Indian idol glum and grim,
Scarcely he seemed the sound to hear
Of voices shouting, far and near:
“Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt
By the women o’ Morble’ead!”
“Hear me, neighbors!” at last he cried,—
“What to me is this noisy ride?
What is the shame that clothes the skin
To the nameless horror that lives within?
Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck,
And hear a cry from a reeling deck!
Hate me and curse me,—I only dread
The hand of God and the face of the dead!”
Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea
Said, “God has touched him! why should we!”
Said an old wife mourning her only son,
“Cut the rogue’s tether and let him run!”
So with soft relentings and rude excuse,
Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose,
And gave him a cloak to hide him in,
And left him alone with his shame and sin.
Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!
MAUD MULLER[8]
Maud Muller on a summer’s day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee
The mock-bird echoed from his tree.
But when she glanced to the far-off town,
White from its hill-slope looking down,
The sweet song died, and a vague unrest
And a nameless longing filled her breast,—
A wish that she hardly dared to own,
For something better than she had known.
The Judge rode slowly down the lane,
Smoothing his horse’s chestnut mane.
He drew his bridle in the shade
Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid,
And asked a draught from the spring that flowed
Through the meadow across the road.
She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,
And filled for him her small tin cup,
And blushed as she gave it, looking down
On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.
“Thanks!” said the Judge; “a sweeter draught
From a fairer hand was never quaffed.”
He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,
Of the singing birds and the humming bees;
Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether
The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.
And Maud forgot her brier-torn gown,
And her graceful ankles bare and brown;
And listened, while a pleased surprise
Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.
At last, like one who for delay
Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away.
Maud Muller looked and sighed: “Ah me!
That I the Judge’s bride might be!
“He would dress me up in silks so fine,
And praise and toast me at his wine.
“My father should wear a broadcloth coat;
My brother should sail a painted boat.
“I’d dress my mother so grand and gay,
And the baby should have a new toy each day.
“And I’d feed the hungry and clothe the poor,
And all should bless me who left our door.”
The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,
And saw Maud Muller standing still.
“A form more fair, a face more sweet,
Ne’er hath it been my lot to meet.
“And her modest answer and graceful air
Show her wise and good as she is fair.
“Would she were mine, and I to-day,
Like her, a harvester of hay;
“No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,
Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues,
“But low of cattle and song of birds,
And health and quiet and loving words.”
But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,
And his mother, vain of her rank and gold.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune;
And the young girl mused beside the well
Till the rain on the unraked clover fell.
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go;
And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.
Oft, when the wine in his glass was red,
He longed for the wayside well instead;
And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms
To dream of meadows and clover-blooms.
And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,
“Ah, that I were free again!
“Free as when I rode that day,
Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay.”
She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door.
But care and sorrow, and childbirth pain,
Left their traces on heart and brain.
And oft, when the summer sun shone hot
On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot,
And she heard the little spring brook fall
Over the roadside, through the wall,
In the shade of the apple-tree again
She saw a rider draw his rein;
And, gazing down with timid grace,
She felt his pleased eyes read her face.
Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls
Stretched away into stately halls;
The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,
The tallow candle an astral burned,
And for him who sat by the chimney lug,
Dozing and grumbling o’er pipe and mug,
A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, “It might have been.”
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes;
And, in the hereafter, angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away!
RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE[9]
O Mother Earth! upon thy lap
Thy weary ones receiving,
And o’er them, silent as a dream,
Thy grassy mantle weaving,
Fold softly in thy long embrace
That heart so worn and broken,
And cool its pulse of fire beneath
Thy shadows old and oaken.
Shut out from him the bitter word
And serpent hiss of scorning;
Nor let the storms of yesterday
Disturb his quiet morning.
Breathe over him forgetfulness
Of all save deeds of kindness,
And, save to smiles of grateful eyes,
Press down his lids in blindness.
There, where with living ear and eye
He heard Potomac’s flowing,
And, through his tall ancestral trees,
Saw autumn’s sunset glowing,
He sleeps, still looking to the west,
Beneath the dark wood shadow,
As if he still would see the sun
Sink down on wave and meadow.
Bard, Sage, and Tribune! in himself
All moods of mind contrasting,—
The tenderest wail of human woe,
The scorn like lightning blasting;
The pathos which from rival eyes
Unwilling tears could summon,
The stinging taunt, the fiery burst
Of hatred scarcely human!
Mirth, sparkling like a diamond shower,
From lips of life-long sadness;
Clear picturings of majestic thought
Upon a ground of madness;
And over all Romance and Song
A classic beauty throwing,
And laurelled Clio at his side
Her storied pages showing.
All parties feared him: each in turn
Beheld its schemes disjointed,
As right or left his fatal glance
And spectral finger pointed.
Sworn foe of Cant, he smote it down
With trenchant wit unsparing,
And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand
The robe Pretence was wearing.
Too honest or too proud to feign
A love he never cherished,
Beyond Virginia’s border line
His patriotism perished.
While others hailed in distant skies
Our eagle’s dusky pinion,
He only saw the mountain bird
Stoop o’er his Old Dominion!
Still through each change of fortune strange,
Racked nerve, and brain all burning,
His loving faith in Mother-land
Knew never shade of turning;
By Britain’s lakes, by Neva’s tide,
Whatever sky was o’er him,
He heard her rivers’ rushing sound,
Her blue peaks rose before him.
He held his slaves, yet made withal
No false and vain pretences,
Nor paid a lying priest to seek
For Scriptural defences.
His harshest words of proud rebuke,
His bitterest taunt and scorning,
Fell fire-like on the Northern brow
That bent to him in fawning.
He held his slaves; yet kept the while
His reverence for the Human;
In the dark vassals of his will
He saw but Man and Woman!
No hunter of God’s outraged poor
His Roanoke valley entered;
No trader in the souls of men
Across his threshold ventured.
And when the old and wearied man
Lay down for his last sleeping,
And at his side, a slave no more,
His brother-man stood weeping,
His latest thought, his latest breath,
To Freedom’s duty giving,
With failing tongue and trembling hand
The dying blest the living.
Oh, never bore his ancient State
A truer son or braver!
None trampling with a calmer scorn
On foreign hate or favor.
He knew her faults, yet never stooped
His proud and manly feeling
To poor excuses of the wrong
Or meanness of concealing.
But none beheld with clearer eye
The plague-spot o’er her spreading,
None heard more sure the steps of Doom
Along her future treading.
For her as for himself he spake,
When, his gaunt frame upbracing,
He traced with dying hand “Remorse!”
And perished in the tracing.
As from the grave where Henry sleeps,
From Vernon’s weeping willow,
And from the grassy pall which hides
The Sage of Monticello,
So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone
Of Randolph’s lowly dwelling,
Virginia! o’er thy land of slaves
A warning voice is swelling!
And hark! from thy deserted fields
Are sadder warnings spoken,
From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons
Their household gods have broken.
The curse is on thee,—wolves for men,
And briers for corn-sheaves giving!
Oh, more than all thy dead renown
Were now one hero living!
MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA[10]
The blast from Freedom’s Northern hills, upon its Southern way,
Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay:
No word of haughty challenging, nor battle bugle’s peal,
Nor steady tread of marching files, nor clang of horsemen’s steel.
No trains of deep-mouthed cannon along our highways go;
Around our silent arsenals untrodden lies the snow;
And to the land-breeze of our ports, upon their errands far,
A thousand sails of commerce swell, but none are spread for war.
· · · · ·
What means the Old Dominion? Hath she forgot the day
When o’er her conquered valleys swept the Briton’s steel array?
How side by side, with sons of hers, the Massachusetts men
Encountered Tarleton’s charge of fire, and stout Cornwallis, then?
Forgets she how the Bay State, in answer to the call
Of her old House of Burgesses, spoke out from Faneuil Hall?
When, echoing back her Henry’s cry, came pulsing on each breath
Of Northern winds the thrilling sounds of “Liberty or Death!”
What asks the Old Dominion? If now her sons have proved
False to their fathers’ memory, false to the faith they loved;
If she can scoff at Freedom, and its great charter spurn,
Must we of Massachusetts from truth and duty turn?
· · · · ·
A voice from lips whereon the coal from Freedom’s shrine hath been,
Thrilled, as but yesterday, the hearts of Berkshire’s mountain men:
The echoes of that solemn voice are sadly lingering still
In all our sunny valleys, on every wind-swept hill.
And when the prowling man-thief came hunting for his prey
Beneath the very shadow of Bunker’s shaft of gray,
How, through the free lips of the son, the father’s warning spoke;
How, from its bonds of trade and sect, the Pilgrim city broke!
A hundred thousand right arms were lifted up on high,
A hundred thousand voices sent back their loud reply;
Through the thronged towns of Essex the startling summons rang,
And up from bench and loom and wheel her young mechanics sprang!
The voice of free, broad Middlesex, of thousands as of one,
The shaft of Bunker calling to that of Lexington;
From Norfolk’s ancient villages, from Plymouth’s rocky bound
To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her round;
From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm repose
Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua flows,
To where Wachuset’s wintry blasts the mountain larches stir,
Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of “God save Latimer!”
And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay!
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,
And the cheer of Hampshire’s woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.
The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,
Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!
Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!
Look to it well, Virginians! In calmness we have borne,
In answer to our faith and trust, your insult and your scorn;
You’ve spurned our kindest counsels; you’ve hunted for our lives;
And shaken round our hearths and homes your manacles and gyves!
We wage no war, we lift no arm, we fling no torch within
The fire-damps of the quaking mine beneath your soil of sin;
We leave ye with your bondmen, to wrestle, while ye can,
With the strong upward tendencies and godlike soul of man!
But for us and for our children, the vow which we have given
For freedom and humanity is registered in heaven;
No slave-hunt in our borders,—no pirate on our strand!
No fetters in the Bay State,—no slave upon our land!
THE PINE-TREE[11]
Lift again the stately emblem on the Bay State’s rusted shield,
Give to our Northern winds the Pine-Tree on our banner’s tattered field.
Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
Answering England’s royal missive with a firm, “Thus saith the Lord!”
Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array!
What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do to-day.
Tell us not of banks and tariffs, cease your paltry pedler cries;
Shall the good State sink her honor that your gambling stocks may rise?
Would ye barter man for cotton? That your gains may sum up higher,
Must we kiss the feet of Moloch, pass our children through the fire?
Is the dollar only real? God and truth and right a dream?
Weighed against your lying ledgers must our manhood kick the beam?
O my God! for that free spirit, which of old in Boston town
Smote the Province House with terror, struck the crest of Andros down!
For another strong-voiced Adams in the city’s streets to cry,
“Up for God and Massachusetts! Set your feet on Mammon’s lie!
Perish banks and perish traffic, spin your cotton’s latest pound,
But in Heaven’s name keep your honor, keep the heart o’ the Bay State
sound!”
Where’s the man for Massachusetts? Where’s the voice to speak her free?
Where’s the hand to light up bonfires from her mountains to the sea?
Beats her Pilgrim pulse no longer? Sits she dumb in her despair?
Has she none to break the silence? Has she none to do and dare?
O my God! for one right worthy to lift up her rusted shield,
And to plant again the Pine-Tree in her banner’s tattered field!
ICHABOD[12]
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore!
Revile him not, the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!
Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage,
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age,
Falls back in night.
Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
A bright soul driven,
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
From hope and heaven!
Let not the land once proud of him
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 lost, 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!
THE LOST OCCASION[13]
Some die too late and some too soon,
At early morning, heat of noon,
Or the chill evening twilight. Thou,
Whom the rich heavens did so endow
With eyes of power and Jove’s own brow,
With all the massive strength that fills
Thy home-horizon’s granite hills,
With rarest gifts of heart and head
From manliest stock inherited,
New England’s stateliest type of man,
In port and speech Olympian;
Whom no one met, at first, but took
A second awed and wondering look
(As, turned, perchance, the eyes of Greece
On Phidias’ unveiled masterpiece);
Whose words in simplest homespun clad,
The Saxon strength of Cædmon’s had,
With power reserved at need to reach
The Roman forum’s loftiest speech,
Sweet with persuasion, eloquent
In passion, cool in argument,
Or, ponderous, falling on thy foes
As fell the Norse god’s hammer blows,
Crushing as if with Talus’ flail
Through Error’s logic-woven mail,
And failing only when they tried
The adamant of the righteous side,—
Thou, foiled in aim and hope, bereaved
Of old friends, by the new deceived,
Too soon for us, too soon for thee,
Beside thy lonely Northern sea,
Where long and low the marsh-lands spread,
Laid wearily down thy august head.
Thou shouldst have lived to feel below
Thy feet Disunion’s fierce upthrow;
The late-sprung mine that underlaid
Thy sad concessions vainly made.
Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter’s wall
The star-flag of the Union fall,
And armed rebellion pressing on
The broken lines of Washington!
No stronger voice than thine had then
Called out the utmost might of men,
To make the Union’s charter free
And strengthen law by liberty.
How had that stern arbitrament
To thy gray age youth’s vigor lent,
Shaming ambition’s paltry prize
Before thy disillusioned eyes;
Breaking the spell about thee wound
Like the green withes that Samson bound;
Redeeming in one effort grand,
Thyself and thy imperilled land!
Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee,
O sleeper by the Northern sea,
The gates of opportunity!
God fills the gaps of human need,
Each crisis brings its word and deed.
Wise men and strong we did not lack;
But still, with memory turning back,
In the dark hours we thought of thee,
And thy lone grave beside the sea.
Above that grave the east winds blow,
And from the marsh-lands drifting slow
The sea-fog comes, with evermore
The wave-wash of a lonely shore,
And sea-bird’s melancholy cry,
As Nature fain would typify
The sadness of a closing scene,
The loss of that which should have been.
But, where thy native mountains bare
Their foreheads to diviner air,
Fit emblem of enduring fame,
One lofty summit keeps thy name.
For thee the cosmic forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
The prescient ages shaping with
Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.
Sunrise and sunset lay thereon
With hands of light their benison,
The stars of midnight pause to set
Their jewels in its coronet.
And evermore that mountain mass
Seems climbing from the shadowy pass
To light, as if to manifest
Thy nobler self, thy life at best!
BARBARA FRIETCHIE[14]
Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,
The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.
Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple and peach tree fruited deep,
Fair as the garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,
On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain-wall;
Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.
Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;
Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
“Halt!”—the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!”—out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane and sash:
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word;
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:
All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.
Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.
Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.
Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave,
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;
And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!
LAUS DEO![15]
It is done!
Clang of bell and roar of gun
Send the tidings up and down.
How the belfries rock and reel!
How the great guns, peal on peal,
Fling the joy from town to town!
Ring, O bells!
Every stroke exulting tells
Of the burial hour of crime.
Loud and long, that all may hear,
Ring for every listening ear
Of Eternity and Time!
Let us kneel:
God’s own voice is in that peal,
And this spot is holy ground.
Lord, forgive us! What are we,
That our eyes this glory see,
That our ears have heard the sound!
For the Lord
On the whirlwind is abroad;
In the earthquake He has spoken;
He has smitten with His thunder
The iron walls asunder,
And the gates of brass are broken!
Loud and long
Lift the old exulting song;
Sing with Miriam by the sea,
He has cast the mighty down;
Horse and rider sink and drown;
“He hath triumphed gloriously!”
Did we dare,
In our agony of prayer,
Ask for more than He has done?
When was ever His right hand
Over any time or land
Stretched as now beneath the sun?
How they pale,
Ancient myth and song and tale,
In this wonder of our days,
When the cruel rod of war
Blossoms white with righteous law,
And the wrath of man is praise!
Blotted out!
All within and all about
Shall a fresher life begin;
Freer breathe the universe
As it rolls its heavy curse
On the dead and buried sin!
It is done!
In the circuit of the sun
Shall the sound thereof go forth.
It shall bid the sad rejoice,
It shall give the dumb a voice,
It shall belt with joy the earth!
Ring and swing,
Bells of joy! On morning’s wing
Send the song of praise abroad!
With a sound of broken chains
Tell the nations that he reigns,
Who alone is Lord and God!
ON RECEIVING AN EAGLE’S QUILL FROM LAKE SUPERIOR
All day the darkness and the cold
Upon my heart have lain,
Like shadows on the winter sky,
Like frost upon the pane;
But now my torpid fancy wakes,
And, on thy Eagle’s plume,
Rides forth, like Sindbad on his bird,
Or witch upon her broom!
Below me roar the rocking pines,
Before me spreads the lake
Whose long and solemn-sounding waves
Against the sunset break.
I hear the wild Rice-Eater thresh
The grain he has not sown;
I see, with flashing scythe of fire,
The prairie harvest mown!
I hear the far-off voyager’s horn;
I see the Yankee’s trail,—
His foot on every mountain-pass,
On every stream his sail.
By forest, lake, and waterfall,
I see his pedler show;
The mighty mingling with the mean,
The lofty with the low.
He’s whittling by St. Mary’s Falls,
Upon his loaded wain;
He’s measuring o’er the Pictured Rocks,
With eager eyes of gain.
I hear the mattock in the mine,
The axe-stroke in the dell,
The clamor from the Indian lodge,
The Jesuit chapel bell!
I see the swarthy trappers come
From Mississippi’s springs;
And war-chiefs with their painted brows,
And crests of eagle wings.
Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe,
The steamer smokes and raves;
And city lots are staked for sale
Above old Indian graves.
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of nations yet to be;
The first low wash of waves, where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The rudiments of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm;
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form!
Each rude and jostling fragment soon
Its fitting place shall find,—
The raw material of a State,
Its muscle and its mind!
And, westering still, the star which leads
The New World in its train
Has tipped with fire the icy spears
Of many a mountain chain.
The snowy cones of Oregon
Are kindling on its way;
And California’s golden sands
Gleam brighter in its ray!
Then blessings on thy eagle quill,
As, wandering far and wide,
I thank thee for this twilight dream
And Fancy’s airy ride!
Yet, welcomer than regal plumes,
Which Western trappers find,
Thy free and pleasant thoughts, chance sown,
Like feathers on the wind.
Thy symbol be the mountain-bird,
Whose glistening quill I hold;
Thy home the ample air of hope,
And memory’s sunset gold!
In thee, let joy with duty join,
And strength unite with love,
The eagle’s pinions folding round
The warm heart of the dove!
So, when in darkness sleeps the vale
Where still the blind bird clings,
The sunshine of the upper sky
Shall glitter on thy wings!
MY PSALM
I mourn no more my vanished years:
Beneath a tender rain,
An April rain of smiles and tears,
My heart is young again.
The west-winds blow, and, singing low,
I hear the glad streams run;
The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
No longer forward nor behind
I look in hope or fear;
But, grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now and here.
I plough no more a desert land,
To harvest weed and tare;
The manna dropping from God’s hand
Rebukes my painful care.
I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at my door.
The airs of spring may never play
Among the ripening corn,
Nor freshness of the flowers of May
Blow through the autumn morn;
Yet shall the blue-eyed gentian look
Through fringèd lids to heaven,
And the pale aster in the brook
Shall see its image given;—
The woods shall wear their robes of praise,
The south-wind softly sigh,
And sweet, calm days in golden haze
Melt down the amber sky.
Not less shall manly deed and word
Rebuke an age of wrong;
The graven flowers that wreathe the sword
Make not the blade less strong.
But smiting hands shall learn to heal—
To build as to destroy;
Nor less my heart for others feel
That I the more enjoy.
All as God wills, who wisely heeds
To give or to withhold,
And knoweth more of all my needs
Than all my prayers have told!
Enough that blessings undeserved
Have marked my erring track;
That wheresoe’er my feet have swerved,
His chastening turned me back;
That more and more a Providence
Of love is understood,
Making the springs of time and sense
Sweet with eternal good;—
That death seems but a covered way
Which opens into light,
Wherein no blinded child can stray
Beyond the Father’s sight;
That care and trial seem at last,
Through Memory’s sunset air,
Like mountain-ranges overpast,
In purple distance fair;
That all the jarring notes of life
Seem blending in a psalm,
And all the angles of its strife
Slow rounding into calm.
And so the shadows fall apart,
And so the west-winds play;
And all the windows of my heart
I open to the day.
THE ETERNAL GOODNESS
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.
Who fathoms the Eternal Thought?
Who talks of scheme and plan?
The Lord is God! He needeth not
The poor device of man.
I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground
Ye tread with boldness shod;
I dare not fix with mete and bound
The love and power of God.
Ye praise His justice; even such
His pitying love I deem:
Ye seek a king; I fain would touch
The robe that hath no seam.
Ye see the curse which overbroods
A world of pain and loss;
I hear our Lord’s beatitudes
And prayer upon the cross.
More than your schoolmen teach, within
Myself, alas! I know:
Too dark ye cannot paint the sin,
Too small the merit show.
I bow my forehead to the dust,
I veil mine eyes for shame,
And urge, in trembling self-distrust,
A prayer without a claim.
I see the wrong that round me lies,
I feel the guilt within;
I hear, with groan and travail-cries,
The world confess its sin.
Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!
Not mine to look where cherubim
And seraphs may not see,
But nothing can be good in Him
Which evil is in me.
The wrong that pains my soul below
I dare not throne above,
I know not of His hate,—I know
His goodness and His love.
I dimly guess from blessings known
Of greater out of sight,
And, with the chastened Psalmist, own
His judgments too are right.
I long for household voices gone,
For vanished smiles I long,
But God hath led my dear ones on,
And He can do no wrong.
I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.
And if my heart and flesh are weak
To bear an untried pain,
The bruised reed He will not break,
But strengthen and sustain.
No offering of my own I have,
Nor works my faith to prove;
I can but give the gifts He gave,
And plead His love for love.
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!
AT LAST[16]
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!
Be near me when all else is from me drifting;
Earth, sky, home’s pictures, days of shade and shine,
And kindly faces to my own uplifting
The love which answers mine.
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.
Some humble door among Thy many mansions,
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease,
And flows forever through heaven’s green expansions
The river of Thy peace.
There, from the music round about me stealing,
I fain would learn the new and holy song,
And find at last, beneath Thy trees of healing,
The life for which I long.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
-----
Footnote 1:
Carpenter’s _Whittier_, p. 118.
Footnote 2:
Carpenter’s _Whittier_, p. 287.
Footnote 3:
For the circumstances in which _Snow-Bound_ was written, see the
prefatory memoir. The passage here given begins with the second night
of the storm.
Footnote 4:
See Pickard’s _Life of Whittier_, pp. 276, 426–428, and
_Whittier-Land_, pp. 66–67.
Footnote 5:
A remarkable custom, brought from the Old Country, formerly prevailed
in the rural districts of New England. On the death of a member of the
family, the bees were at once informed of the event, and their hives
dressed in mourning. This ceremonial was supposed to be necessary to
prevent the swarms from leaving their hives and seeking a new
home.—WHITTIER.
The scene is minutely that of the Whittier homestead.
Footnote 6:
See Carpenter’s _Whittier_, p. 30.
Footnote 7:
In the valuable and carefully prepared _History of Marblehead_,
published in 1879 by Samuel Roads, Jr., it is stated that the crew of
Captain Ireson, rather than himself, were responsible for the
abandonment of the disabled vessel. To screen themselves they charged
their captain with the crime. In view of this the writer of the ballad
addressed the following letter to the historian:
OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, _5 mo. 18, 1880_.
MY DEAR FRIEND; I heartily thank thee for a copy of thy _History of
Marblehead_. I have read it with great interest and think good use has
been made of the abundant material. No town in Essex County has a
record more honorable than Marblehead; no one has done more to develop
the industrial interests of our New England seaboard, and certainly
none have given such evidence of self-sacrificing patriotism. I am
glad the story of it has been at last told, and told so well. I have
now no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ireson’s ride is the correct
one. My verse was founded solely on a fragment of rhyme which I heard
from one of my early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead.
I supposed the story to which it referred dated back at least a
century. I knew nothing of the participators, and the narrative of the
ballad was pure fancy. I am glad for the sake of truth and justice
that the real facts are given in thy book. I certainly would not
knowingly do injustice to any one, dead or living.
I am very truly thy friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
Footnote 8:
The recollection of some descendants of a Hessian deserter in the
Revolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested the
somewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no real
foundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recalling
an incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maine
seaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stopped
to rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refresh
him with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wall
across the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attire
was at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed that
she strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing as
she did so, through the tan of her cheek and neck.—WHITTIER.
Footnote 9:
Though not published until 1847, several lines indicate that the poem
was written not long after Randolph’s death in 1833. In a letter
published in July, 1833, Whittier says: “In the last hour of his
[Randolph’s] existence, when his soul was struggling from its broken
tenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act of
a former period [the manumission of his slaves]. Light rest the turf
upon him, beneath his patrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made
happy by his benevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it.”
Footnote 10:
Written on reading an account of the proceedings of the citizens of
Norfolk, Va., in reference to George Latimer, the alleged fugitive
slave, who was seized in Boston without warrant at the request of James
B. Grey, of Norfolk, claiming to be his master. The case caused great
excitement North and South, and led to the presentation of a petition to
Congress, signed by more than fifty thousand citizens of Massachusetts,
calling for such laws and proposed amendments to the Constitution as
should relieve the Commonwealth from all further participation in the
crime of oppression. George Latimer himself was finally given free
papers for the sum of four hundred dollars.—WHITTIER.
Footnote 11:
Written on hearing that the Anti-Slavery Resolves of Stephen C. Phillips
had been rejected by the Whig Convention in Faneuil Hall, in
1846.—WHITTIER.
Footnote 12:
This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil
consequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March speech of
Daniel Webster in support of the “compromise,” and the Fugitive Slave
Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary my
admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the
great Senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and,
in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my protest. I saw, as I
wrote, with painful clearness its sure results,—the Slave Power arrogant
and defiant, strengthened and encouraged to carry out its scheme for the
extension of its baleful system, or the dissolution of the Union, the
guaranties of personal liberty in the free States broken down, and the
whole country made the hunting-ground of slave-catchers. In the horror
of such a vision, so soon fearfully fulfilled, if one spoke at all, he
could only speak in tones of stern and sorrowful rebuke.
But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of a common
inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity of judgment.
Years after, in _The Lost Occasion_, I gave utterance to an almost
universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag
which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this
desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of “Liberty and
Union, one and inseparable.”—WHITTIER.
Footnote 13:
See footnote to _Ichabod_.
Footnote 14:
This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the
incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has
since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the
story was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted by
all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed
gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion,
holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when
the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she
denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and
drove them out; and when General Burnside’s troops followed close upon
Jackson’s, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May
Quantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave
her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has
been a blending of the two incidents.—WHITTIER.
Footnote 15:
On hearing the bells ring on the passage of the constitutional amendment
abolishing slavery. The resolution was adopted by Congress, January 31,
1865. The ratification by the requisite number of States was announced
December 18, 1865. [The suggestion came to the poet as he sat in the
Friends’ Meeting-house in Amesbury, where he was present at the regular
Fifth-day meeting. All sat in silence, but on his return to his home, he
recited a portion of the poem, not yet committed to paper, to his
housemates in the garden room. “It wrote itself, or rather sang itself,
while the bells rang,” he wrote to Lucy Larcom.]
Footnote 16:
Recited by one of the little group of relations, who stood by the poet’s
bedside, as the last moment of his life approached.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 71, changed "Like an Indian idol glum and trim" to "Like an Indian
idol glum and grim".
2. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
3. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
4. Re-indexed footnotes using numbers and collected together at the end
of the last chapter.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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