JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 375 



the Merrimac of the future, with its scores of mill-wheels aud 

 its white -walled farmhouses and its floating flags of freedom, 

 a lovelier sight than his memories of the vine-clad Rhine, with 

 its clowns and puppets, its flagons and its despotism. Whittier 

 found the Merriinac lovelier himself, — a task in which he was 

 probably helped by the narrow limits of his travels. He loved 

 the Nature about him. He found in it something that constantly 

 rewarded and strengthened his life-long love. 



Expressing this constant delight in the country that his verses 

 have made peculiarly his own, he accomplished, half unwittingly, 

 the work which I believe will ultimately be thought his best. 

 One may question, if one choose, the merit of his personal and 

 religious poems; one may find his romantic narratives trivial, 

 and his passionate advocacy of reform blind, dangerous, trucu- 

 lent; but one cannot deny that he has seen the landscapes of his 

 own New England with an eye as searching as it was loving, or 

 that he has told us what he saw so simply, so truly, so con- 

 stantly, that, however time and chance may change in years to 

 come the face of the regions he knew so well, the things he saw 

 and loved may be seen and loved throughout time by all pos- 

 terity. The peculiar character of his poetry of Nature is that 

 it is not interpretative, but faithfully representative. The 

 examples of it already quoted are enough to show this trait. 

 There are critics, then, and real lovers of poetry, who find his 

 work harshly literal, unimaginative, prosaic. Such critics, I 

 think, will not let themselves sympathize with the exquisitely 

 sympathetic sense of fact that underlies his utter simplicity. 

 When he tried to interpret, he added nothing to his work. 

 When he was content to tell us what he saw, he showed us con- 

 stantly what many of us should never have seen for ourselves ; 

 and this he showed so truly that, as proves in the centuries true 

 of the art which the centuries pronounce great, each one of us 

 may in turn interpret it anew for himself, just as each may 

 interpret for himself the life that passes before his living eyes. 



In the constant strength of his instinctive fidelity to Nature, 

 I think Whittier distinguishes himself from almost all other 

 American men of letters. In most of our literature there is a 

 quality of consciousness. Sometimes this takes the form of 

 aggressive cleverness; sometimes it deliberately assumes the 

 traditional dignity of culture; often — and perhaps most charac- 

 teristically — it half consciously, half unwittingly, follows or re- 



