JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 369 



what seems to me the most notable trait of all. Flemish pic- 

 tures one thinks of as pictures of a peasantry. In "Snow- 

 Bound" we have a country folk very rare in human history. 

 No life could be much simpler, much more remote from luxuri- 

 ous comfort or lazy ease, than the life that is pictured here. But 

 for all their brave rusticity, these sturdy Yankees, toiling in 

 summer on their rocky farms, resting perforce in such winter 

 as buried them in almost Arctic snow-drifts, are no peasants. 

 What makes them what they are is that they are still lords of 

 themselves and of the soil they till. Simple with all the sim- 

 plicity of hereditary farming folk, they are at the same time 

 gentle with the unconscious grace of people who know no 

 earthly superiors. This is the phase of human nature that 

 Whittier knew first and best. This is what he assumed and 

 believed that all mankind might be. And this is the stuff of 

 which any sound democracy must be made. So of this stormy 

 evening he writes : 



*' Shut in from all the world without, 

 We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 

 Content to let the north-wind roar 

 In baffled rage at pane and door, 

 While the red logs before us beat 

 The frost-line back with tropic heat; 

 And ever, when a louder blast 

 Shook beam and rafter as it passed. 

 The merrier up its roaring draught 

 The great throat of the chimney laughed; 

 The house-dog on his paws outspread 

 Laid to the fire his drowsy head, 

 The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 

 A couchant tiger's seemed to fall ; 

 And, for the winter's fireside meet, 

 Between the andirons' straddling feet, 

 The mug of cider* simmered slow, 

 The apples sputtered in a row. 

 And, plose at hand, the basket stood 

 With nuts from brown October's wood." 



This vivid simplicity of description is generally recognized. 

 Less obvious, I think, and less certainly known, is the occasional 

 ultimate simplicity of phrase which makes certain lines of 



* It has generally been customary in New England, T think, not to deem 

 cider spirituous. 



VOL. xxvii. (n. s. xx.J 24 



