JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

The parallel between Whittier and the Scottish Burns breaks down completely if it is pressed too far, but to a certain point it holds remarkably true. Both were country born of humble parentage. The Massachusetts of Whittier — his father's farm lay not far from Haverhill was very similar to the Ayrshire of Burns, a rock-bound, scanty-soiled, sparselysettled region, behind which lay a background of rugged hills. The youth of both was bare of all that made for the refinements of life and was spent by both in the hardest of physical toil. For each of them social diversions were exceedingly restricted: for weeks at a time they might not speak with a soul outside their own little circle save at church on the Sabbath. Both were reared under strict religious traditions, Burns in the faith of the Covenanters, Whittier strange anomaly in Puritan New England - after the straitest sect of the Quakers, even retaining in his speech through his whole life the thee and thou of his people. Both were individualists of extreme type, fierce haters of autocracy and oppression of the weak by the strong. Both were poets of the heart and the emotions rather than of the intellect. In The Cotter's Saturday Night' and its New England analogue Snow-Bound,' and 'A Man's a Man for a' That,' and its New England cousins the anti-slavery poems of Whittier, one may find many more points of contact, but it is useless to press farther. Whittier matured slowly at the age when the Scottish singer had finished his work, the New Englander had hardly begun. He was frail of physique; he was bound by his environment; he was for a long time uncertain of himself.

The essential facts in his biography are few: the coming into his possession of a stray copy of Burns; the timid submission of poems of his own to the local papers; the visit to the little farm by Garrison, the anti-slavery apostle, who had been attracted by the poems; the few months of schooling at Haverhill Academy, expenses paid from money earned by shoemaking; the venture in newspaper work first at Boston and finally at Hartford, Connecticut; the return with broken health to the old farm in 1832, and the removal four years later to Amesbury, Massachusetts which he made his home for the rest of his life, these are the essentials. From 1833 when he published his pamphlet Justice and Expediency, until the day of the emancipation proclamation, anti-slavery agitation may be called his profession. With Garrison and others he went about proclaiming his gospel of freedom; he conducted for a short time an abolitionist paper in Philadelphia; he poured out a surprising amount of prose, the most of it directed against the great evil that filled his whole thoughts and he wrote poetry rapidly and continuously, all of it in the same direction: collecting it in 1838 as Ballads and Anti-Slavery Poems and in 1849 as Voices of Freedom. With a fervor almost Hebraic he denounced every phase of the slavery movement and when the cause of abolition was won, he poured forth his jubilation in the Miriam-like song of triumph Laus Deo.'

Whittier's Snow-Bound, 1866, first fruits of the calmer after-the-war period of his life, gave him his final place among the American poets. During the next twenty-five years he wrote much of his native New England,- of her mountains and streams and wild flowers, of her legends and her early history. He is the leading balladist of his period and moreover he is the most American of all the poets who wrote before the war. During these years he produced his most enduring product. The anti-slavery poems are undoubtedly the most spontaneous and intense things he did, but with every year they become more and more unintelligible to readers who know nothing by experience of the era from which they came. They sprang up as a part of the propaganda of a great social revolution and they must always be connected with that movement. The time has already come when they are unintelligible without copious foot-notes. The rest of his work, however, is not for a time, but for all time.

THE MORAL WARFARE When Freedom, on her natal day, Within her war-rocked cradle lay, An iron race around her stood, Baptized her infant brow in blood;

And, through the storm which round her swept,

Their constant ward and watching kept.

Then, where our quiet herds repose,
The roar of baleful battle rose,

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