it a matter of conscience to be a strong controversialist and to make the better reason triumph over the worse. This spirit of intellectual militancy, so evident in his abolitionist writings, is also to be found in many of his most deeply religious poems. The spirit is hardly compatible with the popular conception of pacifism, but it is entirely so with the type of pacifism which Whittier avowed. It must also be understood that Whittier followed what Quakers call "the inner light"a direct guidance of man by God, of a mystical sort which finds the intervention of a priest and the tenets of an inflexible creed equally distasteful. With these considerations in mind one can better understand the poems themselves. Of those written in opposition to slavery, the majority have at least one poetic quality: a glowing intensity. When to this intensity is joined the dignity of expression of which Whittier was capable, and when the subject is one of more than local interest, then the resulting production has real value as poetry. All the fervor of a Hebrew prophet pulses in Massachusetts to Virginia. Something of greatness, too, pervades the more kindly lines of Brown of Ossawatomie. In Ichabod, Whittier's burning indignation at what he considered Webster's apostacy lifts the verse far above the level of personal invective. At the lowest estimate, the poems just mentioned, together with the address to Garrison, Laus Deo, and a few others, suffice to show that Whittier could achieve distinction in a sort of verse at which Longfellow, for instance, had tried his hand and virtually failed. In the field of brief narrative poems, Whittier had an unqualified success. The vigor of Skipper Ireson's Ride, Barbara Frietchie, and The Pipes at Lucknow, is no less effective than the quiet charm of his descriptive and reflective poems. Indeed, it is hard to find any American poet who has written better ballads than Whittier's. If, however, Whittier's fame were to rest on a single poem, the universal choice would undoubtedly be Snow-Bound. As the explanatory notes in this volume show, the poem is largely autobiographical; in this connection it inevitably brings to mind The Deserted Village and The Cotter's Saturday Night. From memories of his own childhood, Goldsmith constructed a series of artistic sketches, of which those of the Parson and the Schoolmaster will always be remembered. Burns, with minute fidelity, gave an idealized picture of a single evening in the home of a Scottish peasant. Whittier enlarged the scope of his poem to include more than a whole day, and thus brought together a considerable number of pictures reminiscent of his own early life. That Snow-Bound is somewhat diffuse, and that its different parts are of unequal merit, will probably be admitted by its warmest admirers. Yet the poem gains more than it loses by its length; it makes us so intimately acquainted with the Whittier household, and creates so perfectly the atmosphere of home life, that after more than half a century it still stands as a masterpiece of description and of characterization-a poem "notable," as Mr. Bliss Perry says, "not so much for sensuous beauty or for any fresh range of thought, as for its vividness, its fidelity of homely detail, its unerring feeling for the sentiment of the hearthside." The title Religious Poems, prefixed by Whittier to a group of seventy-five pieces, suggests indirectly the patent fact that the tone of his whole poetic output is "religious." This religious spirit is to be found, for example, in Snow-Bound, in the anti-slavery poems, and in the collection At Sundown (the benediction at the end of his life), almost as much as in poems chosen at random from this specially classified group. Within this limited group, however, there are several points worthy of note: One is the persistence with which Whittier combatted the idea of a God of Vengeance-a Calvinistic conception to which many of his contemporaries still clung; poems like The Minister's Daughter and The Meeting-to mention only two among many-are so controversial as to be almost satiric. Again, it should be remembered that passages from Whittier are used as hymns even in churches whose creeds and ritual the poet attacked with vigor. Finally, there is the generally recognized truth that Our Master is one of the most spiritual poems in our language. Here Whittier succeeded in giving utterance to ideas which are fundamental in the simple Quaker faith, and which for the most part are shared by all Christians. The message of the poem-that of love from God to man, from man to God, and from man to man-was the motivating force of his own life; it moulded his views on race problems and on war; it gave him courage for self-sacrifice; it brought him in happiness to a serene old age, in which he was universally loved as man and as poet. Despite the fact that some of Whittier's work is marred by bad rimes (though it should be noted that the inaccuracy often disappears when one pronounces the rimewords as they were pronounced in eastern Massachusetts), despite the fact that he devoted much of his energy to polemics rather than to poetry, and that his work is lacking in both the originality and depth that mark the greatest literature, nevertheless Whittier wrote enough poetry distinguished by simple beauty, rugged strength, and sincere religious feeling, to assure him a position among the chief American poets. If we add to this achievement his political activity from 1833 to 1865, his relative success in writing historical essays, and his permanent influence on our religious thought, it becomes self-evident that he will always hold a place of high honor among American men of letters. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Whittier bibliography in the C. H. A. L. should be consulted by any student who wishes more than the most obvious suggestions such as are here set down. EDITIONS. The Riverside Edition, Boston, 1888, 7 vols., is an admirable collected edition of Whittier's work. The best one-volume edition of the poetry is the Cambridge, ed. Horace Scudder, Boston, 1894. BIOGRAPHIES. Either George D. Carpenter's John Greenleaf Whittier (A. M. L. series), Boston, 1903, or T. W. Higginson's John Greenleaf Whittier (E. M. L. series), N. Y. 1902, is an admirable brief biography. The most exhaustive treatment is S. T. Pickard's The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, Boston, revised edition 1907, 2 vols. NOTES TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 658. This poem, read at the Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, December, 1833, is more than a tribute to a personal friend. It marks Whittier's formal avowal of the principles of abolition. PENTUCKET 659. The town is now called Haverhill. Whittier gives another account of this attack in his prose article entitled The Border War of 1708. The poem was written in 1838. MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA 661. The immediate cause of the poem was the arrest in 1843 of George Latimer, a fugitive slave who had taken refuge in Massachusetts. Over fifty thousand citizens of Massachusetts petitioned Congress for reforms which should forever free them from any participation whatsoever in the slave trade. First published in The Liberator, January, 1843. 662. 67. Essex. Whittier here begins calling the roll of the counties of Massachusetts. THE SHOEMAKERS 663. Published in Songs of Labor, 1850, though written in 1845. 7. St. Crispin's day. St. Crispin, a shoemaker, was martyred ca. 287. His day is October 25. PROEM 666. Written at the end of 1847, and published in 1849 as the introductory verses in the first collected edition of Whittier's poetry. The accuracy of Whittier's self-criticism is notable. 33. Marvell. Andrew Marvell (16211678), a Puritan poet. 669. Whittier once said that the story of the poem had no foundation in actual fact, but that he got a hint for the character of Maud Muller when he and his sister once saw in a hay field a young girl who blushed as she tried to cover her bare feet by raking hay over them. Written in 1854. 670. 94. Astral. An elaborately wrought table-lamp. 95. Chimney lug. A pole from which a kettle hung over the fire. SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE 672. Some time after publishing the poem Whittier learned that Ireson was in reality blameless, but that as a result of a conspiracy on the part of a cowardly crew he had been falsely accused and subjected to the ignominy here described. 3. Apuleius's Golden Ass. In the second century Apuleius, a Roman philos opher, wrote Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass as it was popularly called. a satiric narrative of a young man named Lucian who was changed into an ass. 4. One-eyed Calender's horse of brass. A calender or dervish was a religious mendicant. Whittier's reference is to a story in The Arabian Nights. 682. 215. The Chief of Gambia's golden shore. From Sarah Morton's poem, The African Chief. 286. Sewell's ancient tome. The History of the Quakers, by William Sewell (1654-1720), a Dutch Quaker and a man of letters. The book was highly praised by Charles Lamb in his essay, A Quakers' Meeting. 289. Chalkley's Journal. Thomas Chalkley (1675-1749) records in his Journal the details of the incident here related by Whittier. 307. Our uncle. In his essay, The Fish I Didn't Catch, Whittier says, "Our bachelor uncle was a quiet, genial man, much given to hunting and fishing."-Prose Works, I, 323. 683. 320. Apollonius of old. Apollonius Tyanæus, a philosopher of the first century. 322. Hermes. The Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, reputed to have had great knowledge of magic, has for centuries been confused with the god Thoth. 332. White. Gilbert White (1720-1793) made his Natural History of Selborne more readable than the general run of such works by his vivid and colorful descriptions. 684. 476. Pindus-born Araxes. A river of Greece which rises in the Pindus Mountains. 685. 510. Another guest. more. See next note. Harriet Liver 555. The crazy queen of Lebanon. Lady Hester Stanhope, like Harriet Livermore, was an eccentric_religious fanatic of unsound mind. The two women wandered over much of the near East, and lived for a time on the slope of Mt. Lebanon, awaiting the second coming of Christ. 687. 683. Ellwood's meek, drab-skirted Muse. An English Quaker (1639-1713), who wrote an uninspired epic on David. Posterity has remembered him more kindly for his suggestion to Milton that he write Paradise Lost. 694. Daft McGregor. Sir Gregor McGregor, a Scot who attempted to establish a colony in Costa Rica. 696. Taygetos. A mountain in Greece. 697. Ypsilanti, A Greek patriot (17921828), who took an active part in freeing Greece from Turkish rule. 719. The weird palimpsest. Literally, a parchment from which the first writing has been erased, in order that it may be used again. Here it means simply an ancient book. 741. Some Truce of God. An agreement or plan much talked of during the eleventh century, for the purpose of reducing the amount of warfare and bloodshed. OUR MASTER This poem, like The Eternal Goodness (above, p. 678), shows Whittier's religious poetry at its best. Several popular church hymns have been formed from the two poems. ABRAHAM DAVENPORT 689. Colonel Abraham Davenport, of Stamford, Conn., was an historical character whom Whittier admired because of his firm conduct in the State House on May 19, 1780, the terrifying "dark day." The poem was written in 1866. SUNSET ON THE BEARCAMP 690. Without being in any way imitative of Wordsworth, this description of the scenery of Bearcamp River, New Hampshire, suggests Wordsworth's view of Nature in at least two particulars: the insistence on the immediate presence of God in nature; and the concluding idea, that the poet will always retain in his memory the beauties of the scene which he is viewing. Compare Tintern Abbey, passim, and the last stanza of I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Almost every discussion of Holmes includes a statement to the effect that he was born in Cambridge, lived most of his life in Boston, and was a member of what he himself called the "Brahmin caste" of New England-a man whose ancestors for generations had followed one or another of the learned professions, and had contributed to the intellectual life of the communities in which they lived, and a man who himself continued in the way his fathers trod. It is quite as much to the point to indicate that Holmes was in some ways unique in his reaction to both his heredity and his environment. Despite the strict orthodoxy of his father's Calvinism, Holmes became a Unitarian, and devoted much of his energy to combating a conception of God which had dominated New England since long before the time of Jonathan Edwards. He loved the good things of life with a catholicity of taste unknown to the "Brahmin caste"; in his zest for life, his enjoyment of the many phases of music, science, and letters, he was a Renaissance spirit in the environment of a Puritan. He was a connoisseur of old violins; he toyed with the microscope by the hour, and finally made an optical invention worth a fortune if he had taken out a patent; he loved a spirited horse to such an extent that his friends said he maintained his medical practise largely to justify the expense of his stable. As an undergraduate at Harvard he had dabbled in verse with enough success to win the election as Class Poet, but after his graduation in 1829 he turned to law rather than to letters. After one year in the Law School, he frankly admitted that poetry had interfered with his studies; nevertheless the wide popularity of his earliest poem of note, Old Ironsides (1830), did not restrain him from a new interest, medicine. To this he devoted four years of hard work in Boston and Paris, and the lure of a still broader culture took him into England, Germany, and Italy. With his return to America at the end of 1835 Holmes's joy in the artistic side of life, and in life itself, made it impossible for him to confine himself to any one activity. From the publication of his first volume of poems in 1836 until the founding of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, he divided his intellectual efforts with fair impartiality between teaching anatomy-first at Dartmouth, and after 1847 in the Harvard Medical School-writing poetry, practising medicine, and lecturing in public. His marriage (1840) to Miss Amelia Jackson brought domestic responsibilities which made him careful of his financial interests, but which extended, rather than limited, the range of his interests. The spirit of levity which led him to announce, when he began the practice of medicine, "The smallest of fevers thankfully received," is said to have lost him an occasional patient who preferred solemnity to mirth at the sick-bed. He served for thirty-five years with great distinction as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, where he became famous as an entertaining instructor and a productive scientist. When the Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857, the editor, Lowell, pressed Holmes into immediate service, with the result that the overwhelming success of the BreakfastTable series made its many-sided author henceforth primarily a man of letters. Even then, however, Holmes's diversity of interests persisted in making itself felt: he wrote novels-"medicated novels," they have been called-designed principally as vehicles for his theological and biological views, Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Moral Antipathy (1884); essays and poems almost without number; and biographies of his friends Motley and Emerson. His temperate ways of living enabled him to enjoy to the full his old age, in which the social delights of the Saturday Club were his greatest pleasure. He had by this time become in one sense the most provincial of Bostonians; for fifty years the ties of his home, his profession, his college, his club, and his business affairs (for his publishers accounted him an excellent business man) all combined to make him for and of Boston. Yet on his brief trip to Europe in 1886 he was given honorary degrees by Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh; and long before his death in 1894 he had become an international figure in the world of letters. Although here and there one of Holmes's poems is outstanding for some special quality -Old Ironsides for its vigor; The Chambered Nautilus for its spirituality; My Aunt, The Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay, and a dozen others for sheer humor-yet during his own lifetime he was best known for his occasional poems, such as those he wrote year after year for the reunion of his class at Harvard, and for the birthdays of his friends. With many of these apparently trifling pieces he said he took more pains than a minister takes with the preparation of his Sunday sermon. The best of them are little masterpieces of celebration or greeting or appreciation, in which the poetry with none of the cold glitter of formal vers de société-flows along with almost the friendly informality of conversation and sparkles with Popeian wit. The most popular bit of this familiar verse, at which Holmes was so adept, is perhaps The Last Leaf. But more truly representative is the best of his reunion poems, The Boys. Here are combined all the usual Holmes characteristics: a touch of Harvard spirit, a sentimental reference to old age, a vitality that rises above any regret for the passing years, an appreciation of the worth of his friendsall these bound together by the author's habitual mood of conviviality and goodfellowship. Most of Holmes's verse was, from the very nature of the subject matter, ephemeral or provincial; poems written specifically for the dedication of the Boston Library or for the dinner in honor of Whittier's seventieth birthday may not attract the readers of another century. Yet it is something that he was foremost among the American poets of his age at this type of verse, and that it would be hard to find his superior even among his great contemporaries in England. As has often been suggested, what a Poet Laureate he would have made! If it is true that Holmes's poetry often has the charming intimacy of conversation, it is equally true that his conversation had the polished perfection of poetry. Many of his contemporaries have borne witness to the fact that he was the best talker in Bostonboth the most interesting and the most brilliant-and that, too, at a time when-if ever -Boston was "the Hub." In this connection it would be a pity to overlook the points of similarity and of contrast between Dr. Johnson at The Club in the London of the seventeen-sixties, nd Holmes at the Saturday Club of Boston a century later; Johnson, with his gigantic figure and truculent manners, "tossing and goring" people right and left; Holmes, five feet three, suave, almost dapper, courteous to a degree, using his rapier of wit against the idea rather than the man who advanced it-or if he did encounter an opponent, thrusting home so skillfully that the victim scarcely knew he was impaled; yet each of them dominating the greatest minds of his age by sheer conversational power. The names of the illustrious members of Johnson's Club have been immortalized by Boswell; the Saturday Club had, in this sense, no Boswell; but its membership included Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Motley, the younger Dana, Prescott, Howells, Aldrich, and in addition to these a dozen other men who, though not primarily men of letters, stood-like President Eliot and Bishop Brooks-at the head of their respective professions. Yet in a very genuine sense Holmes did have a Boswell; not a biographer, but one to report and give lasting form to his conversational brilliancies, a man amply qualified-himself. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), The Professor (1859), The Poet (1872), and Over the Teacups (1889), he has reproduced the best of his own conversation. "The best things which he said, the best bits in his letters, were very sure to be encountered afterwards in print. He gathered up the fragments, that nothing should be lost." (-Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by John T. Morse, Jr., II, 24.) The most famous of these books is, of course, The Autocrat. Here for the first time Holmes found his perfect medium of expression-conversational prose interspersed with bits of verse and an occasional poem like The Chambered Nautilus,-a medium flexible enough to allow full play to his manysided personality. As in brilliant conversation, there are abrupt changes from one mood to another-now a keen flash of wit, now a dogmatic utterance, and now a suggestion of sentiment. There is a deal of argument, too, but it is always rapid, logical, and incisive. Some of the sly irony has doubtless been misunderstood by the majority of casual readers; for instance the remark that a pun is "the lowest form of wit." Holmes happened to be an inveterate punster himself, and even with the approach of blindness in his old age, he could write that he suffered from "cataract" still in the "kitten" stage. Yet the very subtlety of Holmes's manner gives the book one of its principal charms, for with each re-reading one is sure to find fresh delights to provoke thoughtful laughter. Seldom if ever has a series of essays been conceived and carried out so successfully in the spirit of high comedy. The Professor and The Poet continue, with only a little less piquancy, the manner of The Autocrat. Either of the two later volumes would have been enough to make the author famous; Holmes was never "written out"-not even in Over the Teacups; his later work shows only a slight falling-off in |