386 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



question which has divided popular feeling rendered our political paths 

 widely divergent. Both of us early saw the danger which threatened the 

 country. . . . But while he believed in the possibility of averting it by 

 concession and compromise, I, on the contrary, as firmly believed that 

 such a course could oidy strengthen and confirm what I regarded as a 

 gigantic conspiracy against the rights and liberties, the union and the life, 

 of the nation. . . . 



" Recent events have certainly not tended to change this belief on my 

 part ; but in looking over the past, while I see little or nothing to retract 

 in the matter of opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that, through the 

 very intensity of my convictions, I may have done injustice to the motives 

 of those with whom I differed. As respects Edward Everett, it seems to 

 me that only within the last four years I have truly known him." * 



Fifteen years before lie wrote this letter, he had written con- 

 cerning Webster's Seventh of March Speech the scathing invec- 

 tive which he named " Ichabod " : 



" So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn 

 "Which once he wore ! 

 The glory from his gray hairs gone 

 Forevermore ! 



• ••••• 



" Let not the land once proud of him 

 Insult him now, 

 Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, 

 Dishonored brow. 



" But let its humbled sons instead, 

 From sea to lake, 

 A long lament, as for the dead, 

 In sadness make. 



• ••••• 



" Then pay the reverence of old days 

 To his dead fame; 

 Walk backward, with averted gaze, 

 And hide the shame! " f 



Fifteen years after Edward Everett's death, and thirty years 

 after this " Ichabod " had seen the light, Whittier wrote of 

 Webster once more. And in his collected works he departs for 

 once from chronology, and puts beside " Ichabod " his final poem 

 on Webster, " The Lost Occasion " : 



* Prose Works, Vol. II. p. 274 (1865). 

 t Poetical Works, Vol. IV. p. G2. 



