History of American Literature Part 24

"I was never an enemy to the South or the holders of slaves. I inherited from my Quaker ancestry hatred of slavery, but not of slaveholders. To every call of suffering or distress in the South, I have promptly responded to the extent of my ability. I was one of the very first to recognize the rare gift of the Carolinian poet Timrod, and I was the intimate friend of the lamented Paul H. Hayne, though both wrote fiery lyrics against the North."

With a few striking exceptions, his most popular poems were written after the close of the Civil War. His greatest poem, _Snow-Bound_, was published in the year after the cessation of hostilities (1866). His last thirty years were a time of comparative calm. He wrote poetry as the spirit moved him. He had grown to be loved everywhere at the North, and his birthday, like Longfellow's, was the occasion for frequent celebrations. For years before the close of the war, in fact until _Snow-Bound_ appeared, he was very poor, but the first edition of that poem brought him in ten thousand dollars, and after that he was never again troubled by poverty. In a letter written in 1866, he says:--

"If my health allowed me to write I could make money easily now, as my anti-slavery reputation does not injure me in the least, at the present time. For twenty years I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and magazine editors, but I was enabled by rigid economy to live in spite of them."

[Ill.u.s.tration: KITCHEN FIREPLACE IN WHITTIER'S HOME, EAST HAVERHILL, Ma.s.s.]

His fixed home for almost all of his life was in the valley of the Merrimac River, at East Haverhill, until 1836, and then at Amesbury, only a few miles east of his birthplace. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Amesbury cemetery.

POETRY.--Although Whittier wrote much forcible anti-slavery verse, most of this has already been forgotten, because it was directly fashioned to appeal to the interests of the time. One of the strongest of these poems is _Ichabod_ (1850), a bitter arraignment of Daniel Webster, because Whittier thought that the great orator's _Seventh of March Speech_ of that year advised a compromise with slavery. Webster writhed under Whittier's criticism more than under that of any other man.

"... from those great eyes The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies The man is dead!"

Thirty years later, Whittier, feeling that perhaps Webster merely intended to try to save the Union and do away with slavery without a conflict, wrote _The Lost Occasion_, in which he lamented the too early death of the great orator:--

"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, * * * * *

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."

Whittier is emphatically the poet of New England. His verses which will live the longest are those which spring directly from its soil. His poem ent.i.tled _The Barefoot Boy_ tells how the typical New England farmer's lad acquired:--

"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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHITTIER'S BIRTHPLACE IN WINTER (SCENE OF "SNOW BOUND")]

His greatest poem, the one by which he will probably be chiefly known to posterity, is _Snow-Bound_, which describes the life of a rural New England household. At the beginning of this poem of 735 lines, the coming of the all-enveloping snowstorm, with its "ghostly finger tips of sleet" on the window-panes, is the central event, but we soon realize that this storm merely serves to focus intensely the New England life with which he was familiar. The household is shut in from the outside world by the snow, and there is nothing else to distract the attention from the picture of isolated Puritan life. There is not another poet in America who has produced such a masterpiece under such limitations. One prose writer, Hawthorne, in _The Scarlet Letter_, had indeed taken even more unpromising materials and achieved one of the greatest successes in English romance, but in this special narrow field Whittier has not yet been surpa.s.sed by poets.

The sense of isolation and what painters would call "the atmosphere" are conveyed in lines like these:--

"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 pa.s.sed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed."

In such a focus he shows the life of the household; the mother, who often left her home to attend sick neighbors, now:--

"... seeking to express Her grateful sense of happiness For food and shelter, warmth and health, And love's contentment, more than wealth,"

the uncle:--

"... innocent of books, Was rich in lore of fields and brooks, * * * * *

A simple, guileless, childlike man, Strong only on his native grounds, The little world of sights and sounds Whose girdle was the parish bounds,"

the aunt, who:--

"Found peace in love's unselfishness,"

the sister:--

"A full rich nature, free to trust, Truthful and even 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."

Some read Snow-Bound for its pictures of nature and some for its still more remarkable portraits of the members of that household. This poem has achieved for the New England fireside what Burns accomplished for the hearths of Scotland in _The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_.

Whittier wrote many fine short lyrical poems, such as _Ichabod_, _The Lost Occasion_, _My Playmate_ (which was Tennyson's favorite), _In School Days_, _Memories_, _My Triumph_, _Telling the Bees_, _The Eternal Goodness_, and the second part of _A Sea Dream_. His narrative poems and ballads are second only to Longfellow's. _Maud Muller_, _Skipper Iresons Ride_, _Ca.s.sandra Southwick_, _Barbara Frietchie_, and _Mabel Martin_ are among the best of these.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS--Whittier and Longfellow resemble each other in simplicity. Both are the poets of the ma.s.ses, of those whose lives most need the consolation of poetry. Both suffer from diffuseness, Whittier in his greatest poems less than Longfellow. Whittier was self-educated, and he never traveled far from home. His range is narrower than Longfellow's, who was college bred and broadened by European travel. But if Whittier's poetic range is narrower, if he is the poet of only the common things of life, he shows more intensity of feeling. Often his simplest verse comes from the depths of his heart. He wrote _In School Days_ forty years after the gra.s.s had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the word which the boy had missed:--

"'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!'

"He lives to learn, in life's hard school, How few who pa.s.s above him Lament their triumph and his loss, Like her,--because they love him."

Whittier's simplicity, genuineness, and sympathetic heart stand revealed in those lines.

His youthful work shows traces of the influence of many poets, but he learned most from Robert Burns. Whittier himself says that it was Burns who taught him to see

"... through all familiar things The romance underlying,"

and especially to note that

"Through all his tuneful art, how strong The human feeling gushes!"

The critics have found three indictments against Whittier; first, for the unequal value of his poetry; second, for its loose rhymes; and third, for too much moralizing. He would probably plead guilty to all of these indictments. His tendency to moralize is certainly excessive, but critics have too frequently forgotten that this very moralizing draws him closer to the heart of suffering humanity. There are times when the majority of human beings feel the need of the consolation which he brings in his religious verse and in such lines as these from _Snow-Bound:_--

"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!"

He strives to impress on all the duty of keeping the windows of the heart open to the day and of "finding peace in love's unselfishness."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891

[Ill.u.s.tration: J.R. LOWELL]

Early Years.--James Russell Lowell, the son of the Rev. Charles Lowell, was a descendant of one of the best of the old New England families. The city of Lowell and the Lowell Inst.i.tute of Boston received their names from uncles of the author. His mother's name was Spence, and she used to tell her son that the Spence family, which was of Scotch origin, was descended from Sir Patrick Spens of ballad fame. She loved to sing to her boy in the gloaming:--

"O forty miles off Aberdeen, 'Tis fifty fathoms deep, And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens, Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOWELL'S MOTHER]

From her Celtic blood her son inherited a tendency toward poetry. When a child, he was read to sleep with Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ and he found amus.e.m.e.nt in retelling its stories to his playmates.

James Russell Lowell was born in 1819, in the suburbs of Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, in the fine old historic home called "Elmwood," which was one of the few homes to witness the birth and death of a great American author and to remain his native residence for seventy-two years.

His early opportunities were in striking contrast to those of Whittier; for Lowell, like his ancestors for three generations, went to Harvard. Because of what the Lowell side of his family called "the Spence negligence," he was suspended from college for inattention to his studies and sent to Concord to be coached by a tutor. We know, however, that a part of Lowell's negligence was due to his reading and imitating such poetry as suited his fancy. It was fortunate that he was sent to Concord, for there he had the opportunity of meeting Emerson and Th.o.r.eau and of drinking in patriotism as he walked "the rude bridge that arch'd the flood" (p. 179). He was elected cla.s.s poet, but he was not allowed to return in time to deliver his poem before his cla.s.smates, although he received his degree with them in 1838.

MARRIAGE AND NEW IMPULSES.--Like Irving and Bryant, Lowell studied law, and then gave up that profession for literature. In 1839 he met Miss Maria White, a transcendentalist of n.o.ble impulses. Before this he had made fun of the abolitionists, but under her influence he followed men like Whittier into the anti-slavery ranks. She was herself a poet and she wrote to Lowell after they became engaged:--

"I love thee for thyself--thyself alone; For that great soul whose breath most full and rare Shall to humanity a message bear, Flooding their dreary waste with organ tone."

Under such inspiration, "the Spence negligence" left him, and with rapid steps he entered the temple of fame. In December, 1844, the month in which he married her, he wrote the finest lines ever penned by him:--