Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/25

Rh Martin" "The Garrison of Cape Ann," "The Swan Song of Parson Avery," "Telling the Bees," "The Last Walk in Autumn," as well as "The Eve of Election " and "Moloch in State Street."

The war for the Union naturally found Whittier strongly stirred, and more than ever watchful of the great issue which throughout his manhood has been constantly before his eves and his triumphant "Laus Deo" is as it were the Nunc Dimittis of this modern prophet and servant of the Lord. But Whittier was a Quaker not in any conventional sense, but by birthright, conviction, and growing consciousness of communion with God. Though he wrote such a stirring ballad, therefore, as "Barbara Frietchie," he wrote also the lines addressed to his fellow-believers:—

It is interesting also to observe how in this time of stress and pain, he escaped to the calm solace of nature. His poem « The Battle Autumn of 1862," records this emotion specifically, but more than one poem in the group "In War Time "bears testimony to this sentiment. Meanwhile other poems written during the years 1861-1865 illustrate the longing of Whittier's nature for relief from the terrible knowledge of human strife, a longing definitely expressed by him in the prelusive address to William Bradford, the Quaker painter, prefacing " Amy Wentworth," in which he says:—

Something of the same note is struck in the introduction to "The Countess." But before the war closed, Whittier met with a personal loss which meant much to him every way. His sister Elizabeth, as we have seen, had been his closest companion, his most intimate acquaintance. He had shared his life with her in no light sense, and now he was to see the flame of that life flicker and at last expire in the early fall of 1864. The first poem after her death, "The Vanishers," in its theme, its faint note as of a bird calling from the wood, is singularly sweet both as a sign of the return of the poet to the world after his flight from it in sympathy and imagination with the retreating spirit of his sister, and as a prophecy of the character of so large a part of Whittier's poetry from this time forward. "The Eternal Goodness," written a twelvemonth later, may be said more positively than any other poem to contain Whittier's creed, and the fullness of faith which characterizes it found free and cheerful expression again and again.

Yet another poem which immediately followed it is significant not only by its repetition of his note of spiritual trust, but by its strong witness to the sane, human quality of Whittier's genius. "Snow-Bound," simple and radiant as it is with human life, is also the reflection of a mind equally at home in spiritual realities. It may fairly be said to sum up Whittier's personal experience and faith, and yet so absolutely free is it from egotism that it has taken its place as the representative poem of New England country life, quite as surely as Burns' "The Cotter's Saturday Night " expresses one large phase of Scottish life.

The success which attended "Snow-Bound" was immediate, and the result was such as to put Whittier at once beyond the caprices of fortune, and to give him so firm a place in