as when he followed Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn with his own The Tent on the Beach, he often failed to rival his graceful brother poet. In American balladry he was pre-eminent; such pieces as "The Swan Song of Parson Avery," "Marguerite,” “Barclay of Ury," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "In the Old South,' hold their place in literature. It is necessary above all to consider the relation of a people's years of growth and ferment to the song which represents them; for in the strains of Whittier, more than in those of any other nineteenth-century lyrist, the saying of Fletcher of Saltoun, as to the ballads and laws of a nation, finds historic illustration. He was the national bard of justice, humanity, and reform, whose voice went up as a trumpet until the victory was won. Its lapses resembled those of Mrs. Browning, who was of his own breed in her fervor and exaltation. To the last it was uncertain whether a poem by Whittier would "turn out a sang or perhaps turn out a sermon "; if the latter, it had deep sincerity and was as close to his soul as the other. He began as a liberator, but various causes employed his pen; his heart was with the people; he loved a worker, and the Songs of Labor convey the zest of the artisan and pioneer. From 1832 to 1863 no occasion escaped him for inspiring the assailants of slavery, or chanting pæans of their martyrdom or triumph. No crusade ever had a truer laureate than the author of "The Virginia Slave Mother," "The Pastoral Letter"-one of his stinging ballads against a time-serving Church, "A Sabbath Scene,' and

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"The Slaves of Martinique."

Randolph of Roanoke" is one of the most pathetic and elevated of memorial tributes. "Ichabod" and "The Lost Occasion," both evoked by the attitude of Webster, are Roman in their condemnation and "wild with all regret."

The green rusticity of Whittier's farm and village life imparted a bucolic charm to such lyrics as "In School Days," "The Barefoot Boy," "The Barefoot Boy," "Telling the Bees," "Maud Muller," and "My Schoolmate." His idyllic masterpiece is the sustained transcript of winter scenery and home-life, Snow-Bound, which has had no equal except Longfellow's "Evangeline" in American favor, but, in fact, nothing of its class since "The Cottar's Saturday Night" can justly be compared with it. Along with the Quaker poet's homing sense and passion for liberty of body and soul, religion and patriotism are the dominant notes of his song. His conception of a citizen's prerogative and duty, as set forth in "The Eve of Election," certainly is not that of one whose legend is "our country, right or wrong." Faith, hope, and boundless charity pervade the "Questions of Life," "Invocation," and "The Two Angels," and are exquisitely blended in "The Eternal Goodness," perhaps the most enduring of his lyrical poems. "We can do without a Church," he wrote in a letter, "we cannot do without God; and of him we are sure." The inward voice was his inspiration, and of all American poets he was the one whose song was most like a prayer. A knightly celibate, his stainless life, his ardor, caused him to be

termed a Yankee Galahad; a pure and simple heart was laid bare to those who loved him in " My Psalm,"

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My Triumph,” and “An Autograph." The spiritual habit abated no whit of his inborn sagacity, and it is said that in his later years political leaders found no shrewder sage with whom to take counsel. When the question of primacy among American poets was canvassed by a group of the public men of Lincoln's time, the vote was for Whittier; he was at least one whom they understood, and who expressed their feeling and convictions. Parkman called him "The poet of New England," but as the North and West then were charged with the spirit of the New England states, the two verdicts were much the same. The facts remain that no other poet has sounded more native notes, or covered so much of the American legendary, and that Whittier's name, among the patriotic, clean and true, was one with which to conjure. He was revered by the people cleaving to their altars and their fires, and his birthdays were calendared as festivals, on which greetings were sent to him by young and old.

VIII

MR. BRYANT'S "THIRTY POEMS " 1

HE pathetic outburst of Cato Major-"It is a

TH

hard thing, Romans, to render an account before the men of a period different from that in which one has lived!"—is a complaint which Mr. Bryant will never be constrained to imitate. His period is our own. While most of his noonday contemporaries have passed into neglect under the test of time, his poetry holds its assured position in the affections and judgment of the tasteful. It has a perennial charm. It is conceived in the abiding spirit of true art, subject in structure to the genius of our language, and is therefore not flat, stale, and unprofitable, when the fashion of the day, on which charlatans depend, has faded with the day itself.

His metres, and the sequences of his words, are those of Collins and Goldsmith and Cowper, and of all other English poets who have refused to depart from the natural order of English verse. To this order successive generations return with ever fresh delight, when wearied of the syllabub inventions whipped up in obedience to a craving for something original or new. And as the metre, so the thought The Round Table, January 16, 1864.

of Mr. Bryant. It is that which was old with the

reflection hatur ancients, and is young in these later times-the pure

philosophy of nature's lessons, the reflex of her visible forms.

Nor has Mr. Bryant's muse been restricted in her seldom flights to the petty limits of local scenery and fact. As befits a poet of this metropolis, his perception is catholic and has a broad horizon. Aloof from cliques, their influences have not confirmed him in his faults, nor led him to insensibly exaggerate the merits of his own vicinage and associates. The injurious effects of the converse situation painfully impress those who observe the self-constituted Mecca of our New England school. There, fine minds and noble characters have been dwarfed and warped by mutual flattery and cohesion. As they grow older, their crotchets are more crotchety, their poetry is less original, their philosophy more awry. But when Mr. Bryant writes of patriotism, he does not confine the splendor of its displays to Lexington and Concord, nor to the valor of a single tribe. His "Conqueror is one who overcometh the world. His religion smacks of no university creed; and his sympathies are unnarrowed by either his political or æsthetic faith. Independent of any year or place, his verses should commend themselves, so long as the grass grows, and the water runs, and the winds breathe through the forests of the land in which he writes. If his affections have any local limit, it is one no less than his native country. For he is peculiarly an American poet.