386 JOHN GREENLEAP WHITTIER. 



question which has divided populai' 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 only 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 he 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 the light withdrawn 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. 62. 



