secret of whose beauty lies partly in the faithfulness with which the details of the farmhouse life are drawn, and partly in the soft and tender lights which memory throws over the picture."-The Nation, March 7, 1867.

"We know of no better example of the tameness of the American Muse than Whittier. . . . . He is, indeed, wholly devoid of the creative faculty to which all true poetry owes its life; and yet this alone could have lifted most of the subjects which he has treated out of the dulness and weariness of the commonplace. . . . Whitter certainly has no fear of trivial and commonplace subjects, but in his treatment of them he rarely, if ever, rises above the level of the verse-maker.

....

He cannot give sprightliness or variety to his verse, which, like a sluggish stream, creeps languidly along. There is no freshness about him, none of the breeziness of nature, none of its joyousness, exuberance, and exultant strength. . . . . Some of his descriptive pieces have been admired, but to us they seem artificial and mechanical. They are the pictures of a view-hunter. . . . . 'Snow-Bound,' a winter idyl, is, in the opinion of several critics, Whittier's best performance. A more hackneyed theme he would probably have found it difficult to choose; nor has he the magic charm that makes the old seem as new. . . . . In Whittier's verse we often catch the unmistakable accent of genuine feeling, and his best lyrics are so artless and simple that they almost disarm criticism. In many ways his influence has doubtless been good."-The Catholic World, January, 1877.

"In Whittier, with his special themes-(his outcropping love of heroism and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses at times like the measur'd step of Cromwell's old veterans)-in Whittier lives the zeal, the moral energy, that founded New England-the splendid rectitude and ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox-I must not, dare not, say the wilfulness and narrowness-though doubtless the world needs now, and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and wilfulness."Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, April 16, 1881. "Whittier's is rather a grand figure, but pretty lean and ascetic-no Greek-not universal and composite enough (don't try, don't wish to be) for ideal Americanism."-Whitman, "Old Poets" (1890), in Complete Prose Works.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

"Be very careful how you tell an author he is droll. Ten to one he will hate you..... ... Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny? Why there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession. If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to tell it. There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit-using that term in its general sense-that its essence consists in a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches. It throws a single ray, separated from the rest-red, yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade-upon an object; never white light-that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit-all the prismatic colors-but never the object as it is in fair daylight. . . . . Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest white

light of truth."-The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, No. III. "A lyric conception,' my friend, the Poet, said, 'hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine,-then a gasp and a great jump of the heart,—then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head, then a long sigh,—and the poem is written.' 'It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,' I replied. 'No,' said he, 'far from it. I said written, but I did not say copied. Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words-words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it.'"-Ibid., No. V. "There are times, though, he [the Poet] says, when it is a pleasure, before going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and clutch up a handful of what grows there-weeds and violets together,—not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That's his idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots just in that way, the other day. . . . . My friend, the Poet, says you must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes to keep them and a little of the soil clinging to them."-Ibid., No. IX. "Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius, namely, that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will and therefore more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the lower or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line."-The Professor at the Breakfast Table, No. X. "On the one hand, I believe that a person with the poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death, love, the hope and vision of eternity-these are images that write themselves in poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New England life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view, as they come before us in so many other aspects. There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows?

who cares? There is no history to the red race,-there is hardly an individual in it: a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk-there is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all red ants. So the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe. . . . . But think of the Old World—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Cæsars. In Italy the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday; Rome under her kings is but an intruding new-comer as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race."-Ibid.

The text is from the 1866 edition.

(375) OLD IRONSIDES. First published in The Boston Daily Advertiser, September 16, 1830. The poem was almost an impromptu, scribbled by Holmes with a pencil on a scrap of paper when he read in The Advertiser of September 14 that "the Secretary of the Navy has recommended to the Board of Navy Commissioners to dispose of the frigate Constitution." The frigate was then thirty-three years old, having been built at Boston in 1797; it had done service against the pirates in the Mediterranean in the war with Tripoli (1801-5), and in the War of 1812 it raptured several British vessels after hard fighting. Holmes's lines were reprinted in newspapers throughout the country and helped to stir up so strong a protest against the sale of the old ship that the order was countermanded; she was practically rebuilt, was kept in service until 1881, and has served since then as a schoolship. Holmes inserted the poem in his "Poetry, a Metrical Essay" (1836), where it is introduced thus:

Hear an old song, which some, perchance, have seen
In stale gazette or cobwebbed magazine.

There was an hour when patriots dared profane

The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain;

And one, who listened to the tale of shame,

Whose heart still answered to that sacred name,

Whose eyes still followed o'er his country's tides

Thy glorious flag, our brave Old Ironsides,

From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn,

Thus mocked the spoilers with his school-boy scorn.

(377) THE LAST LEAF. First published in The Boston Harbinger. Holmes said that the poem was suggested by a figure often seen on the streets of Boston in the early thirties, Major Thomas Melville, who was reputed to have taken part in the Boston Tea-Party of 1774; in old age he still wore the colonial costume, as described

in the poem.

(379) THE COMET. The poem was apparently suggested by the reappearance of Halley's Comet, in 1835, which by its splendor attracted universal interest.

(380) 47, 48. Cf. "The Ancient Mariner," ll. 566, 567:

and all the while

His eyes went to and fro.

(381) URANIA. Lines 385-406. Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, October 14, 1846.

(381) THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. First published in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, No. IV (The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1858), where it was introduced thus: "Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley or Burns or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus. . . . . If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you will find a figure of one of these shells and a section of it. The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?"

(382) THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE. First published in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, No. XI (The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1858).

(385) THE Boys. Read at the reunion of the poet's class, in 1859, on the thirtieth anniversary of their graduation from Harvard College.

(386) 15. "Doctor": Francis Thomas. "Judge": G. T. Bigelow, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. ¶ 17. "Speaker": F. B. Crowninshield, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. ¶ 18. "Mr. Mayor": G. W. Richardson, mayor of Worcester. 19. "Member of Congress": G. T. Davis, who became a representative from Massachusetts in 1851. ¶ 20. "Reverend" What 's-his-name: James Freeman Clarke, a prominent Unitarian clergyman of Boston. ¶ 21. That boy with the grave mathematical look: Benjamin Peirce, one of the foremost American mathematicians, for many years professor in Harvard University. 25. a boy. . . . with a three-decker brain: B. R. Curtis, of the United States Supreme Court. 29. a nice youngster: S. F. Smith, author of "America."

(387) HYMN OF TRUST. First published in The Professor at the BreakfastTable, No. XI (The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1859), where it was introduced thus: "It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber. As I paused at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing. It was not the wild melody 1 had sometimes heard at midnight; no, this was the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word. I had seen the verses in her book; the melody was new to me. Let me finish my page with them."

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

"The strain upon the plan proposed by the Navy Department for breaking up the frigate Constitution, an unhappy suggestion of some one who was probably more familiar with national ship-yards than national feelings, will rank with the best martial songs of England. We think that the comic pieces in this little collec

tion are decidedly the best, or rather we should say those in which a quiet humor is blended with the pathetic so as to heighten the effect of the grotesque without destroying the plaintive character of the whole. . . . . At the same time we must allow that his more comic pieces are exceedingly entertaining, particularly the lines upon the Comet, which is irresistible for its humor and at the same time contains one or two passages of great power."—The North American Review, January, 1837. "We have hardly left ourselves room to say a word about our old favorite, Holmes; but as he is also everybody's favorite, there is no occasion for critics to meddle with him, either to censure or to praise. He can afford to laugh at the whole reviewing fraternity. His wit is all his own, so sly and tingling, but without a drop of ill-nature in it, and never leaving a sting behind. His humor is so grotesque and queer that it reminds one of the frolics of Puck; and deep pathos mingles with it so naturally that when the reader's eyes are brimming with tears he knows not whether they have their source in sorrow or in laughter. The great merits of his English style we noticed on a former occasion; for point, idiomatic propriety, and terseness it is absolutely without a rival."-The North American Review, January, 1849.

"The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were noteworthy. . . . . Such lyrics as . . . . that unique compound of humor and pathos, 'The Last Leaf,' show that he possesses the power of touching the deeper chords of the heart and of calling forth tears as well as smiles. . . . . Holmes writes simply for the amusement of himself and his readers; he deals only with the vanity, the foibles, and the minor faults of mankind, good-naturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting excuses for the folly which he tosses about on the horns of his ridicule."-John G. Whittier, in The National Era (as reprinted in Littell's Living Age, March 17, 1849).

"In all humbleness-for we should be sorry to say aught that might be construed into a detraction or derogation of the merits of this highly cultured and pleasant writer-we shall, nevertheless, endeavor to prove and we hope satisfactorily that his so-called poems are only verses-certainly verses of fine quality, musical in rhythm, chaste in tone, delicate in sentiment, and unexceptionable in point of finish and expression; but still, with all these qualities to recommend them, in our meek opinion only verses, lacking the very elements and essentials that would constitute them poems. Now there is no doubt that this set of verses, like others in the volume, has been wrought with studious care and perhaps with painful study; and yet the result is only a jingle of vacuous commonplaces, tinged with poor sentiment, bearing the same relation to poetry as a page of Martin Tupper's 'Proverbial Philosophy' does to a page of 'Paradise Lost.'. . . . And yet we must do justice to the dormant powers of Doctor Holmes, for occasionally he gives us a sample of what he might do when the higher mood is on him. . . . . Among the few really lofty ebullitions of his fancy "The Chambered Nautilus' is a fair example. This piece wafts rich odors from the fairyland of poesy. Its undulating rhythm of melody, its wide-reaching pathos, and its solemn appeal to the soul cannot be resisted."-The Knickerbocker Monthly, March, 1863.