368 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



remarks. By and by one finds tliem forgotten in a sense that 

 this poet whom one has grown to know has in him lasting ele- 

 ments for which greatness is perhaps no undue name. Through- 

 out his sixty-seven years of work one feels with growing 

 admiration a constant simplicity of feeling and of phrase, as 

 pure as the country air he loved to breathe. One feels, too, con- 

 stant, unswerving purity of nature, of motive, of life. And if 

 one feel, besides, the limits of thought and of experience that 

 made such purity and simplicity possible throughout eighty-five 

 years of human existence, one is none the sadder for that. What 

 Whittier voiced was a life that could be lived in our own New 

 England through the stormiest years of our Nineteenth Century. 

 Limited though it were, that life throughout, in thought, in 

 feeling, in word, in act, was simple and pure, — commonplace, if 

 you will, in more aspects than one; but in one never common- 

 place, — never for a moment was it ignoble. It has been the 

 fortune of New England, above other parts of our country, to 

 fix the standards and the ideals that have hitherto prevailed 

 throughout the continent of North America. There is courage 

 in the thought that even to our own time New England could 

 bring forth and sustain such noble purity as his. 



To feel how genuine, how pure, how noble, the man was, with 

 all his limits, we must consider his work in some detail. His own 

 classification of it, as I have said, is confusing. His prose work, 

 once for all, is of little importance. It shows him possessed of 

 a quietly pleasant narrative style, and of a controversial style, 

 of considerable force. But it phrases, I think, little or nothing 

 that is not equally phrased in his more favorite vehicle of verse. 

 I shall discuss, then, chiefly his verse: first that part of it 

 which most reveals himself; then that which deals with his 

 own experience of Nature; then his romantic narratives; and 

 finally the work which he himself deemed chief, — his lifelong 

 advocacy of human freedom. 



If masterpiece be not an extravagant term for any work of 

 Whittier's, we may perhaps call "Snow-Bound" his master- 

 piece.* At fifty -nine, when almost all of his immediate family 

 were dead, he wrote in tenderly simple verse this account of his 

 earliest memories. "Flemish pictures of old days," he calls it 

 toward the end. The phrase would be apt, but that it ignores 



* Poetical Works, Vol. II. pp. 134-159. 



