The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

but his modesty declines attempting that perfection, and assigns him a lower place. He must still seek definite uses, though this use be to lend imagination or poetic depth to daily labor:—

"But for the dull and flowerless weed
Some healing virtue still must plead,
And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.

"So haply these my simple lays
Of homely toil may serve to show
The orchard-bloom and tasselled maize
That skirt and gladden duty's ways,
The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."

Not pure gold as yet, but genuine silver. The aim at a definite use is still apparent, as he himself perceives; but there is nevertheless a constant native play into them of ideal feeling. It is no longer a struggle for room to draw poetic breath in, but only the absence of a perfectly free and unconscious poetic respiration. Yet they are sterling poems, with the stamp of the mint upon them. And some of the strains are such as no living man but Whittier has proven his power to produce. "Ichabod," for example, is the purest and profoundest moral lament, to the best of our knowledge, in modern literature, whether American or European. It is the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain on the battle-fields of heaven.

Two years later comes the "Chapel of the Hermits," and with it the second epoch in Whittier's poetic career. The epoch of Culture we name it. The poet has now passed the period of outward warfare. All the arrows in the quiver of his noble wrath are spent. Now on the wrong and shame of the land he looks down with deep, calm, superior eyes, sorrowful, indeed, and reproving, but no longer perturbed. His hot, eloquent, prophetic spirit now breathes freely, lurk in the winds of the moment what poison may; for he has attained to those finer airs of eternity which hide ever, like the luminiferous ether, in this atmosphere of time; so that, like the scholar-hero of Schiller, he is indeed "in the time, but not of it." Still his chant of high encouragement shall fly forth on wings of music to foster the nobilities of the land; still over the graves of the faithful dead he shall murmur a requiem, whose chastened depth and truth relate it to other and better worlds than this; still his lips utter brave rebuke, but it is a rebuke that falls, like the song of an unseen bird, out of the sky, so purely moral, so remote from earthly and egoistic passion, so sure and reposeful, that verse is its natural embodiment. The home-elements of his intellectual and moral life he has fairly assimilated; and his verse in its mellowness and rhythmical excellence reflects this achievement of his spirit.

But now, after the warfare, begins questioning. For modern culture has come to him, as it comes to all, with its criticism, its science, its wide conversation through books, its intellectual unrest; it has looked him in the eye, and said, "Are you sure? The dear old traditions,—they are indeed traditions. The sweet customs which have housed our spiritual and social life,—these are customs. Of what are you sure?" Matthew Arnold has recently said well (we cannot quote the words) that the opening of the modern epoch consists in the discovery that institutions and habitudes of the earlier centuries, in which we have grown, are not absolute, and do not adjust themselves perfectly to our mental wants. Thus are we thrown back upon our own souls. We have to ask the first questions, and get such answer as we may. The meaning of the modern world is this,—an epoch which, in the midst of established institutions, of old consecrated habitudes of thought and feeling, of populous nations which cannot cast loose from ancient anchorage without peril of horrible wreck and disaster, has got to take up man's life again from the beginning. Of modern life this is the immediate key.

Our poet's is one of those deep and clinging natures which hold hard by the heart of bygone times; but also he is of a nature so deep and sensitive that the spiritual endeavor of the period must needs utter itself in him. "Art thou sure?"—the voice went sounding keenly, terribly, through the profound of his soul. And to this his spirit, not without struggle and agony, but at length clearly, made the faithful Hebrew response, "I trust." Bravely said, O deep-hearted poet! Rest there! Rest there and thus on your own believing filial heart, and on the Eternal, who in it accomplishes the miracle of that confiding!

Not eminently endowed with discursive intellect,—not gifted with that power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and out of them, together with the material which modern time supplies, build in the skies new architectures, wherein not only the feeling, but the imagination also, of future ages might house,—our poet comes with Semitic directness to the heart of the matter: he takes the divine Yea, though it be but a simple Yea, and no syllable more, in his own soul, and holds childlike by that. And he who has asked the questions of the time and reached this conclusion,—he who has stood alone with his unclothed soul, and out of that nakedness before the Eternities said, "I trust,"—he is victorious; he has entered the modern epoch, and has not lost the spiritual crown from his brows.

The central poem of this epoch is "Questions of Life."

"I am: how little more I know!
Whence came I? Whither do I go?
A centred self, which feels and is;
A cry between the silences;
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife
With sunshine on the hills of life;
A shaft from Nature's quiver cast
Into the Future from the Past;
Between the cradle and the shroud
A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud."

Then to outward Nature, to mythic tradition, to the thought, faith, sanctity of old time he goes in quest of certitude, but returns to God in the heart, and to the simple heroic act by which he that believes believes.

"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,
I come, an over-wearied child,
In cool and shade His peace to find,
Like dew-fall settling on the mind.
Assured that all I know is best,
And humbly trusting for the rest,
I turn....
From Nature and her mockery, Art,
And book and speech of men apart,
To the still witness in my heart;
With reverence waiting to behold
His Avatar of love unfold,
The Eternal Beauty new and old!"

"The Panorama and other Poems," together with "Later Poems,"[13 - Completing the two volumes of collected poems.] having the dates of 1856 and 1857, constitute the transition to his third and consummate epoch. Much in them deserves notice, but we must hasten. And yet, instead of hastening, we will pause, and take this opportunity to pick a small critical quarrel with Mr. Whittier. We charge him, in the first place, with sundry felonious assaults upon the good letter r. In the "Panorama," for example, we find law rhyming with for! You, Mr. Poet, you, who indulge fastidious objections to the whipping of women, to outrage that innocent preposition thus! And to select the word law itself, with which to force it into this lawless connection! Secondly, romance and allies are constantly written by him with the accent on the first syllable. These be heinous offences! A poet, of all men, should cherish the liquid consonants, and should resist the tendency of the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence of his special Quaker culture.

With the "Home Ballads," published in 1863, dawns fully his final period,—long may it last! This is the epoch of Poetic Realism. Not that he abandons or falls away from his moral ideal. The fact is quite contrary. He has so entirely established himself in that ideal that he no longer needs strivingly to assert it,—any more than Nature needs to pin upon oak-trees an affirmation that the idea of an oak dwells in her formative thought. Nature affirms the oak-idea by oaks; the consummate poet exhibits the same realism. He embodies. He lends a soul to forms. The real and ideal in Art are indeed often opposed to each other as contraries, but it is a false opposition. Let the artist represent reality, and all that is in him, though it were the faith of seraphs, will go into the representation. The sole condition is that he shall select his subject from native, spontaneous choice,—that is, leave his genius to make its own elections. Let one, whose genius so invites him, paint but a thistle, and paint it as faithfully as Nature grows it; yet, if the Ten Commandments are meantime uttering themselves in his thought, he will make the thistle-top a Sinai.

It is this poetic realism that Whittier has now, in a high degree, attained. Calm and sure, lofty in humility, strong in childlikeness,—renewing the play-instinct of the true poet in his heart,—younger now than when he sat on his mother's knee,—chastened, not darkened, by trial, and toil, and time,—illumined, poet-like, even by sorrow,—he lives and loves, and chants the deep, homely beauty of his lays. He is as genuine, as wholesome and real as sweet-flag and clover. Even when he utters pure sentiment, as in that perfect lyric, "My Psalm," or in the intrepid, exquisite humility—healthful and sound as the odor of new-mown hay or balsam-firs—of "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," he maintains the same attitude of realism. He states God and inward experience as he would state sunshine and the growth of grass. This, with the devout depth of his nature, makes the rare beauty of his hymns and poems of piety and trust. He does not try to make the facts by stating them; he does not try to embellish them; he only seeks to utter, to state them; and even in his most perfect verse they are not half so melodious as they were in his soul.

All perfect poetry is simple statement of facts,—facts of history or of imagination. Whoever thinks to create poetry by words, and inclose in the verse a beauty which did not exist in his consciousness, has got hopelessly astray.

This attitude of simple divine abiding in the present is beautifully expressed in the opening stanzas of "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 and 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 the door."

It is, however, in his ballads that Whittier exhibits, not, perhaps, a higher, yet a rarer, power than elsewhere,—a power, in truth, which is very rare indeed. Already in the "Panorama" volume he had brought forth three of these,—all good, and the tender pathos of that fine ballad of sentiment, "Maud Muller," went to the heart of the nation. In how many an imagination does the innocent maiden, with her delicate brown ankles,

"Rake the meadow sweet with hay,"

and

"The judge ride slowly down the lane"!

But though sentiment so simple and unconscious is rare, our poet has yet better in store for us. He has developed of late years the precious power of creating homely beauty,[14 - A taste for this had been early indicated, especially in the essays on Bunyan and Robert Dinsmore, in "Old Portraits and Modern Sketches," and in passages of "Literary Recreations." Whittier's prose, by the way, is all worth reading.]—one of the rarest powers shown in modern literature. Homely life-scenes, homely old sanctities and heroisms, he takes up, delineates them with intrepid fidelity to their homeliness, and, lo! there they are, beautiful as Indian corn, or as ploughed land under an October sun! He has thus opened an inexhaustible mine right here under our New-England feet. What will come of it no one knows.

These poems of his are natural growths; they have their own circulation of vital juices, their own peculiar properties; they smack of the soil, are racy and strong and aromatic, like ground-juniper, sweet-fern, and the arbor vitæ. Set them out in the earth, and would they not sprout and grow?—nor would need vine-shields to shelter them from the weather! They are living and local, and lean toward the west from the pressure of east winds that blow on our coast. "Skipper Ireson's Ride,"—can any one tell what makes that poetry? This uncertainty is the highest praise. This power of telling a plain matter in a plain way, and leaving it there a symbol and harmony forever,—it is the power of Nature herself. And again we repeat, that almost anything may be found in literature more frequently than this pure creative simplicity. As a special instance of it, take three lines which occur in an exquisite picture of natural scenery,—and which we quote the more readily as it affords opportunity for saying that Whittier's landscape-pictures alone make his books worthy of study,—not so much those which he sets himself deliberately to draw as those that are incidental to some other purpose or effect.

"I see far southward, this quiet day,
The hills of Newbury rolling away,