JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 367 



" Lo ! the ghastly lips of pain, 

 Dead to all thought save duty's, moved again : 

 ' Put out tlie signals for the other train ! ' 



♦' No nobler utterance since the world began 

 From lips of saint or martyr ever ran, 

 Electric, through the sympathies of man. 



"Others he saved, himself he could not save. 



" Nay, the lost life was saved. He is not dead 

 Who in his record still the earth shall tread 

 With God's clear aureole shining round his head." 



'O 



The noble simplicity of the second passage does something to 

 atone for the appalling literalness and the monstrous hyperbole 

 of the first. But one wonders if any other writer of real merit 

 could ever have deliberately reprinted such passages side by 

 side. 



His lack of humor, then, was serious. So, to a less degree, 

 was his lack of artistic feeling. The remarkably narrow range 

 of his metrical forms, the astonishing errors of his rhymes, are 

 salient and familiar features of his verse. And another defect 

 must have been apparent to whoever has read even the passages 

 that I have already quoted. He had little strength of creative 

 imagination. His poetical figures are almost always both 

 obvious and trite. A lighthouse resembles a minaret; the 

 woods bordering a salt meadow are like the shore bordering the 

 actual sea; a good man, when dead, is provided with an aureole; 

 and so on. The moralizing passages frequent throughout his 

 work display the same weakness. If in his lack of humor he 

 sinks below the commonplace, there is nothing in the technical 

 form of his work, or in the creative power of his imagination, 

 that often rises above it. 



Yet as one grows to know the work of Whittier, one grows 

 insensibly to feel that essentially it is far from commonplace, 

 that it really deserves the importance accorded to it in contem- 

 porary literature, that no small part of it will probably outlive 

 the age to which it was addressed, and perhaps even the work of 

 any other contemporary American. I have purposely touched 

 on his faults, and put them all together. Not to have recognized 

 them would have been deliberately not to see him as he was. In 

 growing to know his work, these, I think, are what one first 



