John Greenleaf Whittier, soon the New England Quaker poet, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 17th December 1807, in a house built by his first colonial ancestor in the seventeenth century. One strain of his blood allied him with Daniel Webster, and both are said to have had 'the Bachiler eyes;' but Webster's were blacker and less piercing than Whittier's. What the homestead and home life were can best be read in Snow-Bound, while 'The Barefoot Boy' is Whittier's full-length portrait of himself in his happy childhood, before the farm-work pressed too hard upon his strength and planted in his constitution the seeds of that weakness which made the habit of his life valetudinarian. His education was that of the district school of the period, except for a brief course at a local academy. There were books in the small family library that gave direction to his taste, inclining it to legendary reminiscences and tales. There was an uncle in the family who contributed liberally to his stock of these. It was an eventful day which was marked by his first reading of Burns's poems, lent him by one of his teachers. Later there came a 'wandering Willie' from Scotland who could recite Burns's dialect poems in an entrancing manner. Whittier was much impressed, and was writing verses, some of them in the Burns dialect, which he managed very well; while to much in the spirit of Burns-his interest in simple joys and cares-he owed a lasting debt. It is sound criticism that describes his Snow-Bound as the New England Cotter's Saturday Night. But his first published poem, 'The Exile,' was more in the manner of Moore than of Burns. The paper containing this was thrown over the wall into a field where Whittier was at work one day in June 1826, and his first triumph was enhanced by a laudatory editorial note. The editor was William Lloyd Garrison, the great anti-slavery reformer, then twenty years of age. His admiration for Whittier's early poems, of which he accepted many for his paper, is hard to understand. They were for the most part feeble reflections of debased literary models, but they made up in abundance what they lacked in quality, nearly one hundred appearing in the years 1827-28. In 1832 Whittier was quite justified in his resolve to give up poetry as something for which he had no gift, and settle to a farmer's life. But in that year he made a fresh start with an apostrophe to Garrison. Nothing before this was worth preserving or has been preserved, except in the appendix to his complete works, to show from what weak beginnings he set out. The apostrophe to Garrison marked his definite adhesion to the anti-slavery cause, which for the next twenty years was the principal subject and inspiration of his see the end of the infernal institution which proscribed me.' This diversion of 'a dreamer born' 'from the Muses' haunts' to 'the crank of an opinion-mill,' Making his rustic reed of song A weapon in the war with wrong, has furnished matter for regret to some of Whittier's critics. But there is every reason to believe that this diversion effected at once his moral and political salvation. It saved him from the career of an intriguing politician, to which his proclivity was so marked that, parallel with his anti-slavery course, he for many years ran another in partisan politics which might have been straighter than it was. This made it easier for him to ally himself with those abolitionists who, parting company with Garrison as too exclusively moral in his agitation, instituted the Liberty party, which sought to reach the abolition of slavery by political means. But while on with this new party he was not quite off with the old, and in 1844 was barely shut out from a congressional election, with Whig help, by the serious condition of his health. It is an interesting reflection that but for this accidental circumstance we might never have had that body of personal and religious poetry on which Whittier's permanent reputation as a poet rests. It was principally as a journalist that he was effective on political and anti-slavery lines. He spent the winter of 1828-29 in Boston editing the American Manufacturer; the next year he was editor of the Haverhill Gazette, and the same year he went to Hartford, Connecticut, to edit the New England Review. In 1831 he published his first book, Legends of New England, for single copies of which he offered eventually as much as five dollars, that he might burn them up. In 1833 he attended in Philadelphia the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the most notable anti-slavery meeting ever held in America, with Garrison for its inspiring soul. Whittier was one of the secretaries of the convention, and a member of the committee which drafted the famous Declaration of Principles. He read to Garrison's face that tribute of admiration which he had written in 1832. His standing in the convention was fixed by his Justice and Expediency, a noble echo of Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonisation, which, denouncing negro colonisation as friendly to slavery, demanded immediate and unconditional emancipation. Returning to Haverhill in 1832, he again took charge of the Gazette. In 1836 the farm was sold and the family removed some eight miles to Amesbury, where, but for summer outings and two years in Philadelphia (1838-40), he henceforth made his home. In Philadelphia he edited the Pennsylvania Freeman, an abolitionist paper, his most important editorial charge. The office of the paper was in Pennsylvania Hall, which, just built, was burned by a pro-slavery mob. Whittier, disguising himself, saved some of his effects, and published his paper the next day with a defiant note. He had had previous experience with mobs in New England, where he went about holding abolition meetings in company with George Thompson, an English agitator who was peculiarly obnoxious to the proslavery mind. Some specimens of his journalism are preserved in the three volumes of prose writings included in his complete works. These are probably inferior to his editorials that dealt with the shifting aspects of the anti-slavery struggle, for his prose was always best when he wrote from inward heat, and worst when he was consciously endeavouring to write attractively. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. After a Photograph. From his apostrophe to Garrison in 1832 to his Laus Deo! which hailed the constitutional end of slavery in 1865, he had a poem for every striking incident of the anti-slavery conflict-one here applauding some heroic word or deed, one there denouncing some new recreancy or perfidy. The most famous, at the time, was his 'Ichabod !' which denounced the defection of Webster from the anti-slavery side in 1850, in his 'Seventh of March Speech.' The politician gaining on the reformer in Whittier's double consciousness, he passed by easy stages from the Liberty to the Free Soil, and thence to the Republican party, each new stage less consistently abolitionist than the last. A man of peace in virtue of his Quakerism, he beat his songs into swords and muskets in the time of the great Civil War. His literary life hardly began in any proper sense until 1857, when the Atlantic Monthly was launched, and he was at once taken on board, having a poem, 'The Gift of Tritemius,' in the first number, and one oftener than not in the succeeding numbers for a score of years. Before this door was opened, the National Era had since 1847 furnished him with a semi-literary vehicle for ballads and poems of a religious character, apart from the main antislavery stress. As early as 1843 there were enough of these to constitute a little book, Lays of my Home, and other Poems, which brought in a few dollars, as did not the anti-slavery collections of 1837 and 1849. Other poems indicative of his widening scope were gathered up in Songs of Labour (1850) and in The Panorama, and other Poems (1856), notably in this last the popular favourites Maud Muller' and 'The Barefoot Boy.' But the Atlantic offered more encouragement to his less strenuous disposition than it had before enjoyed; and besides, as the great war drew to its close, the energy generated by the long anti-slavery struggle sought and found new avenues of expression. The most of Whittier's best-remembered things were written in the decade 1857-67, ballads so different as 'Skipper Ireson's Ride' and 'Amy Wentworth,' and poems of the inner life in which the personal note was clear and sweet. Such were 'My Psalm,' 'My Birthday,' 'My Triumph,' 'My Soul and I,'' The Master,' and 'The Eternal Goodness,' in which this direction of his talent reached its farthest goal. All these were poems of the Quaker's inner light,' and made for the softening of the traditional New England creed and for inter-sectarian amenity. Snow-Bound appeared in 1866, and took the New England heart by storm. With much that was intimately specialised after the forms of Whittier's personal experience, there was much that was representative of the New England farmer's life, so vividly presented that the dullest could not but respond to the reality of its characters and scenes. Besides, the tenderness that brooded over a little world that was hopelessly passing away was a beguiling note. The Tent on the Beach (1867), following, far off, the lead of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, grouped ingeniously some of his most effective ballads with poems of a more subjective character. He never married, but a considerable number of his poems hint the romance of his affections in a fashion that has piqued and baffled much tender curiosity. 'Memories' and 'My Playmate' are among the best of these. With much sensibility to the loveliness of women, he had such appreciation of their spiritual gifts and graces as assured them a preponderance in the order of those friendships which were his life's best satisfactions and delights. Many the tributes paid to these in his too facile verse! Whittier suddenly woke up to find himself famous, and now his anti-slavery record could not too boldly leap to light. What had long retarded now increased his fame, and The Tent on the Beach sold at a rate which Whittier could only with difficulty reconcile to his sense of the right relation of the poet's work to his reward. Similar volumes followed The Tent on the Beach, but inferior in distinct degrees, and leaving SnowBound solitary in its homely charm. For all the delicacy of his health, he lived, an object of increasing reverence and affection, till 7th September 1892, when he was nearly eighty-five years old. Of contemporary American poets he owed least to culture and formal education. Hence the defects of his poetry-its lack of compression, its contracted metrical range, its faulty rhymes and ungrammatical forms. He was more poet than artist, spontaneous to the verge of improvisation, with no self-restraint, spinning too long a thread. Of verbal felicity he had little, save in his effective use of sonorous proper names. His poetry was eloquence, as if he had caught the accent of the anti-slavery heralds and champions. He was pre-eminently the singer of the anti-slavery crusade, proudly saluting its living heroes and its honoured dead, the most representative of New England's poets, affectionately reminiscent of her lore of superstition and romance, and, most significantly, the poet of religious sympathy and hope and trust. Though he wrote few hymns, many have been detached from his poems and sung in churches of all Protestant denominations, to the great enhancement of his fame. With a less general following than Longfellow, he has had a much more cordial welcome among the plain people' and those who subordinate all other interests to those of the religious life. From Massachusetts to Virginia.' We hear thy threats, Virginia! thy stormy words and high, Swell harshly on the Southern winds which melt along our sky; Yet, not one brown, hard hand forgoes its honest labour here, No hewer of our mountain oaks suspends his axe in fear. Wild are the waves which lash the reefs along St George's bank,— Cold on the shore of Labrador the fog lies white and dank; Through storm, and wave, and blinding mist, stout are the hearts which man The fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats of Cape Ann. We hunt your bondmen, flying from Slavery's hateful hell,- Our voices, at your bidding, take up the bloodhound's yell, We gather, at your summons, above our fathers' graves, From Freedom's holy altar-horns to tear your wretched slaves! The voice of Massachusetts ! Of her free sons and daughters, Deep calling unto deep aloud,-the sound of many waters! Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand? No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land! Look to it well, Virginians! In calmness we have borne, In answer to our faith and trust, your insult and your scorn; You've spurned our kindest counsels,—you've hunted for our lives, And shaken round our hearths and homes your manacles and gyves! We wage no war,-we lift no arm,-we fling no torch within The fire-damps of the quaking mine beneath your soil of sin; We leave ye with your bondmen, to wrestle, while ye can, With the strong upward tendencies and godlike soul of man! But for us and for our children, the vow which we have given For freedom and humanity is registered in Heaven; Ichabod ! So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn The glory from his gray hairs gone Revile him not,-the Tempter hath And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, O, dumb be passion's stormy rage, Have lighted up and led his age, Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark From hope and heaven! Let not the land once proud of him Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, But let its humbled sons, instead, From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead, In sadness make. Of all we loved and honoured, naught A fallen angel's pride of thought, All else is gone; from those great eyes When faith is lost, when honour dies, The man is dead! Then, pay the reverence of old days In School-Days. Still sits the school-house by the road, A ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow, And blackberry vines are running. Within, the master's desk is seen, Deep scarred by raps official; The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife's carved initial; The charcoal frescoes on its wall; Its door's worn sill, betraying Long years ago a winter sun It touched the tangled golden curls, For near her stood the little boy Where pride and shame were mingled. Pushing with restless feet the snow To right and left, he lingered;— As restlessly her tiny hands The blue-checked apron fingered. He saw her lift her eyes; he felt The soft hand's light caressing, And heard the tremble of her voice, As if a fault confessing. '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!' Still memory to a gray-haired man That sweet child-face is showing, Dear girl! the grasses on her grave Have forty years been growing! He lives to learn, in life's hard school, How few who pass above him Lament their triumph and his loss, Like her, because they love him. From 'My Birthday.' Better than self-indulgent years The outflung heart of youth, Than pleasant songs in idle years The tumult of the truth. Rest for the weary hands is good, Let winds that blow from heaven refresh, Dear Lord, the languid air; And let the weakness of the flesh Thy strength of spirit share. And, if the eye must fail of light, More fine the inward ear! Be near me in mine hours of need From 'My Psalm.' All as God wills, who wisely heeds That death seems but a covered way Wherein no blinded child can stray Beyond the Father's sight; That care and trial seem at last, That all the jarring notes of life Seem blending in a psalm, And all the angels of its strife Slow rounding into calm. And so the shadows fall apart, And so the west-winds play; And all the windows of my heart I open to the day. From 'Snow-Bound.' Shut in from all the world without, The mug of cider simmered slow, What matter how the night behaved? Their written words we linger o'er, No step is on the conscious floor! The stars shine through his cypress-trees! And Love can never lose its own! The complete works of Whittier are published in seven volumes in the Riverside Edition' (1888), and the poems complete in a onevolume edition, the Cambridge' (1894). The Life and Letters, by S. T. Pickard (1894), is the official biography, an excellent piece of work. Other biographies are Higginson's, in 'American Men of Letters' (1892), and Burton's, very brief, in Beacon Biographies' (1900). The best critical study is E. C. Stedman's, in the Poets of America. JOHN WHITE CHADWICK. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-81), born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, practised medicine for two or three years, but became assistant-editor and part-proprietor of a paper at Springfield. In 1870 he helped to found Scribner's Monthly (afterwards The Century Magazine), which he edited; and in it appeared his novels, Arthur Bonnicastle, The Story of Sevenoaks, and Nicholas Minturn. Other works were Timothy Titcomb's Letters (1858), Letters to the Joneses (1863), a history of Western Massachusetts, a Life of Lincoln, and his popular poems, Bitter Sweet (1858), Kathrina (1867), and The Mistress of the Manse (1874). Life of him by Mrs Plunkett (1894). There is a Nathaniel Hawthorne, the most distinguished writer of American fiction, was born in Salem, a coast-town of Massachusetts, some dozen miles from Boston, on 4th July 1804. His ancestors were American from the time of the first settlements. Nathaniel, a sea-captain, father of the novelist, died in 1808. For forty years of widowhood his mother secluded herself and seldom left her room. Two sisters were only a little less recluse. Here was an influence that nursed a similar habit in the boy. An accident at play sent him for companionship to books, which ranged from Shakespeare through Bunyan to the Newgate Calendar. In tastes and temperament the boy was father of the man. His first teacher was Worcester, the distinguished lexicographer. In 1813 the family removed to Raymond in Maine, which was then a province of Massachusetts. Hunting and skating on the beautiful Sebago Lake, and fishing in its clear waters, with much desultory reading, went far to constitute his Raymond life. In 1819 he was back in Salem, reading Waverley, preparing for college, and issuing the Spectator, which ran through four numbers, its circulation limited to a single copy. In 1820 he already contemplated the profession of authorship. In 1821 he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, then recently founded, and better equipped with courage than with a faculty or funds. On his way to Brunswick, through New Hampshire, he made the acquaintance of a Bowdoin sophomore, Franklin Pierce, one of his best friends thereafter. With Longfellow the poet, a classmate, he had slight acquaintance, but was remembered by him as 'a handsome, bashful youth, with a low, musical voice.' Longfellow was one of the more studious set, Hawthorne one of the less studious. He was indifferent to sports, but mildly convivial, and his gambling was made a subject of correspondence with his mother by the president of the college. The stakes were fifty cents worth of wine. At the conclusion of his college course we have the reflection of his actual feelings in Fanshawe, his first novel, where he says that in the inmost heart of his hero there was a dream of undying fame. In spite of his dissuasion, his mother and sisters had returned to Salem, and he joined them there in 1825, and entered at once upon a period of seclusion that dragged its slow length along for a full dozen years. He had no intimacy even with his mother and sisters. Often his meals were left outside the door of his room. Most of his walking, except that of his longer excursions, was done after dark. There was a good local library, in which he burrowed deep; and, had he not disdained them, there were intelligence and culture in the fine old town that might have served him well. The colour of his brooding solitude dyed in the wool the texture of the fancies that he wove assiduously, with little hope of making them attractive to his fellow-men. |