376 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



vives tradition. As somebody has extravagantly said, American 

 verse swarms with, nightingales, — a bird unknown on this conti- 

 nent. For this state of things there is a reason that these perhaps 

 imaginary nightingales typify. An American would not be a 

 true son of the fathers if he did not instinctively love tradition. 

 The emigrants brought from the Old World fireside tales of things 

 and folks, of pomps and grandeurs, of comedies and tragedies, 

 that their children could never know in the flesh. And history 

 has moved fast with us, and society has been overturned' more 

 than once. And Western children to-day are listening to such 

 stories of New England as Yankee children of the early days 

 heard about Old England itself. This love of tradition, which 

 shows itself perhaps most markedly in the passion for geneal- 

 ogy that permeates New England, is a prime trait of the true 

 Yankee. And Whittier was as true a Yankee as ever lived. 

 His first published volume, we remember, was a volume of 

 "New England Legends." New England legends he continued 

 to write almost all his life; and as his reading extended, he 

 wrote many other legends, too, of regions and races that he had 

 never known in the flesh. 



Of the latter little need be said. They are not, I think, pro- 

 foundly characteristic. He got them from books, and he put 

 them in other books, where their simple ballad form makes 

 them pleasantly readable. He generally managed to infuse 

 into them a certain amount of blameless moralizing, which does 

 not enhance their stimulating quality. On the whole, one may 

 class them with that great body of innocuous American verse 

 which is permeated with the innocent unreality of conscious 

 culture. 



The New England legends are of firmer stuff. In his prose 

 works one finds some of the material that goes to make them. 

 "Charms and Eairy Eaith," and "Magicians and Witch Folk," * 

 tell of such actual traditions as were kept alive at the snow- 

 bound fireside. "Margaret Smith's Journal," while no perma- 

 nent contribution to historical fiction, is so true a picture of the 

 Seventeenth Century in New England as to prove beyond per- 

 adventure the solidity of Whittier's study in local history. 

 And verses like these show how well he knew the ancestral 

 Puritans : 



* Prose Works, Vol. I. pp. 385, 399. 



