Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 10.djvu/421

LEFT WHITTIER 361 WHITTINGTON long friendship. About a hundred of his poems appeared in the local newspaper in 1827-1828. Meantime he earned a little money from his trade, shoemaking, and by teaching in a country school. In 1828 he secured a position in Boston on the •'American Manufacturer," and showed by some papers that he wrote his sense of the dignity of labor and of the way in which men were being exploited in in- dustry. After a few months he became editor of the Haverhill "Gazette," chang- ing six months later to the Hartford "Courant." He became interested in pol- itics, and was elected to the Massachu- setts legislature, but since he soon be- came identified with Garrison's anti- slavery propaganda his political career did not prosper. In 1837-1838 he published two volumes of verse, "Ballads," and "Anti-Slavery Poems," that attracted wide attention. Before long he gave up all editorial and JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER political work and settled down to writ- ing at his home at Amesbury, not far from Haverhill. His patriotic and anti- slavery poems were widely used, and are marked by simple and sincere feeling, but his poems about New England rural life possess a value beyond them. His was a voice as authentic as Bryant's and it possessed an accent of locality which the elder poet's lacked. In the numerous poems, frequently collected into small volumes, that he published through the remainder of his life both elements per- sist. In the first group belong "Tous- saint L'Ouverture," "Expostulation," "The Virginia Slave Mother," the "Pas- toral Letter," and, in later years, "Icha- bod," in which he attacked Webster for his seventh of March speech (1850), "Barbara Frietchie," "Laus Deo." In the second belongs a group of ballads, "Songs of Labor," "Home Ballads," such idyls as "Maud MuUer" and "Telling the Bees," and the immortal "Snow Bound" (1866). His fame grew slowly; not un- til the appearance of the last named poem did his work bring him any appre- ciable income. He traveled little, remain- ing throughout his life identified with a small part of Massachusetts soil, but from it seeing a life that he translated into songs that will not die. His last years were full of honor. He became identified with the group that made the "Atlantic" a power in American litera- ture. When he died, September 7, 1892, in his eighty-fifth year. Holmes was the only one of the New England group who remained to write a memorial stanza. Whittier's themes fall into four main classes: Poems dealing with slavery and national questions; nature poems, of which some are based on direct observa- tion of the life about him while others, somewhat more artificial in style, are idyls of a pastoral type; a group ex- pressive of simple and direct religious experience, the fruit of his Quaker faith, some of them hymns of high quality; and, lastly, ballads that are not literary imi- tations of folk ballads, such as Longfel- low wrote, but which give the ballad spirit very accurately. In some of these poems, notably the political and propa- gandist work, we are moved by the in- tensity of his feeling about the evils he saw in American life and politics; in others, the nature group and tha poems of religious experience, we find quietness and restraint. Yet all of them spring from the direct simplicity of his nature, "Ichabod" as fully as "Maud Muller" and the "Barefoot Boy." He did not under- stand Webster or his purposes; he saw only what he regarded as compromise with evil; his passionate intensity springs from the same sources as the songs of labor and rural life. Whittier interests us for his variety in stanza and meter. He wrote no son- nets; he used few of the traditional forms. In "Barefoot Boy" he gets new effects from the four-accent couplet; whatever he does he individualizes. He has few literary allusions; his diction is homely, even inexact at times. He re- minds us of Burns, but he does not imi- tate Burns. His work was his own, a precious strand in the weaving of an American poetry. WHITTINGTON, RICHARD, an English magistrate; born in Pauntley,