bound,' receiving in this country as warm and wide a welcome as those of the Cambridge Laureate. After the war Garrison, at last crowned with honour and rejoicing in the consummation of his work, was seldom heard. Whittier in his hermitage, the resort of many pilgrims, has steadily renewed his song. While chanting in behalf of every patriotic or humane effort of his time, he has been the truest singer of our homestead and wayside life, and has rendered all the legends of his region. into familiar verse. The habit of youth has clung to him, and he often misses, in his too facile rhyme and rhythm, the graces, the studied excellence of modern work. But all in all, as we have seen, and more than others, he has read the heart of New England.

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It would not be fair to test Whittier by the quality of his off-hand work. His verse always was auxiliary to what he deemed the main business of his life, and has varied with the occasions that inspired it. His object was not the artist's, to make the occasion serve his poem, but directly the reverse. . . . Probably it occurred somewhat late to the mind of that pure and duteous enthusiast that there is such a thing as duty to one's art. . . . Nor is it strange that the artistic moral sense of a Quaker poet, reared on a New England farmstead, at first should be deficient. . . . His ear and voice were naturally fine, as some of his early work plainly shows, 'Cassandra Southwick' for instance. If he had occupied himself wholly with poetic work, he would have grown as steadily as his most successful compeers. But his vocation became that of trumpeter to the impetuous reform brigade. He supplied verse

on the instant, often full of vigour, but often little more than the rallying blast of a passing campaign. We are told that from 1832 to the close of our dreadful war in 1865 'his harp of liberty was never hung up.' Not an important occasion escaped him.

His imperfections were those of his time and class. He never learned compression, and still [1885] is troubled more with fatal fluency than our other poets of equal rank,—by an inability to reject poor stanzas and to stop at the right place. But there came a period when his verse was composed with poetic intent and after a less careless fashion. . . His first ballads give the clew to his genius, and now make it apparent that most of his verse may be considered without much regard to dates of production. 'Cassandra Southwick,' alone, showed where his strength lay; of all our poets he is the most natural balladist. . . . His Quaker strains, chanted while the sect is slowly blending with the world's people, seem like its death song. . . . And as a bucolic poet of his own section, rendering its pastoral life and aspect, Whittier surpasses all rivals. . . . Longfellow's rural pieces were done by a skilled workman, who could regard his themes objectively and put them to good use. Lowell delights in out-door life, and his Yankee studies are perfect; still we feel that he is intellectually and socially miles above the people of the vales. Whittier is of their blood, and always the boypoet of the Essex farm, however advanced in years and fame. They are won by the sincerity and ingenuousness of his verse, rooted in the soil and nature as the fern and wild-rose of the wayside. He himself

despises a sham pastoral. There is good criticism, a clear sense of what is needed, in his paper on Robert Dinsmore, the old Scotch bard of his childhood. He says of rural poetry that 'the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may as well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who would successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings, one who has added to his book-lore the large experience of an active participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amusements, the trials and pleasures he describes.'"

Enough of criticism, even the most appreciative, and only the appreciative can be just. All said, we may divide his work into rhetorical and purely artistic poetry. Much was uttered in eager, unfinished, not-much-considered verse, because strongly felt, and fashioned from the feelings with one single object, to stir the hearts of others, not in any sense put forth as exercises in rhyme, exploits for the world's admiration or in search of poetic fame. Allow that this carelessness detracts from all verse so put forth, enough yet remains of Whittier's more artistic work to place him in the glorious company of the best of his poet contemporaries; and, passing all literary judgment, he is to be remembered and honoured as a poet who never forgot the duty or the dignity of a man: his

"Life made by duty epical,

And rhythmic with the truth."