Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/26

xviii the affections of his countrymen as to complete as it were the years of his struggle and his patient endurance. There is something almost dramatic in the appearance of this poem. The war was over : the end of that long contest in which Whittier, physically weak but spiritually strong, had been a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. What was the force which had been too mighty for a great entrenched wrong ? With no conscious purpose, but in the simple delight of poetry, Whittier sang this winter idyl of the North, and one now sees how it imprisons the light which shatters the evil, for it is an epitome of homely work and a family life lived in the eye of God, "duty keeping pace with all," and the whole issuing in that large hope.

The history of Whittier's life after this date is written in his poems. The outward adventure was slight enough. He divided his year between the Amesbury home and that which he established with other kinsfolk at Oak Knoll in Danvers. In the summer time he was wont to seek the mountains of New Hampshire or the nearer beaches that stretch from Newburyport to Portsmouth. The scenes thus familiar to him were trans- lated by him into song. Human life blended with the forms of nature, and he made this whole region as distinctively his poetic field as Wordsworth made the Lake district of Cumberland, or as Irving made the banks of the Hudson. In such a group as "The Tent on the Beach," in "Among the Hills," "The Witch of Wenham," "Sunset on the Bearcamp," "The Seeking of the Waterfall," "How the Women went from Dover," "The Homestead," and many others he records the delight which he took in nature and especially in the human associations with nature.

"The Tent on the Beach" again illustrates the personal attachments which he formed and which constituted so large an element in the last thirty years of his life. In actual contact and in the friendships formed through books, one may read the largeness of Whittier's svmpathy with his fellows, and the warmth of his generous nature. Such poems as the'frequent ones commemorating Garrison, Sumner, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, the Fields's, Mrs. Child, the Spoffords, Stedman, Barnard, Bayard Taylor, Weld and others illustrates the range of his friendship; but the poems also which bear the names of Tilden, Mulford, Thiers, Halleck, Agassiz, Garibaldi illustrate likewise a strong sense of the lives of men who, perhaps, never came within the scope of personal acquaintance.

Nor was it only through human lives that he touched the world about him. His biographer bears witness to the assiduity with which he compensated in later years for the restrictions imposed by necessity on his education in earlier years. He became a great and discursive reader, and his poems, especially after "Snow-Bound," contain many proofs of this both in the suggestions which gave rise to them and in the allusions which they contain. Northern literature is reflected in "The Dole of Jarl Thorkell, "King Volmer and Elsie," "The Brown Dwarf of Rligen," and others; Eastern life and religion reappear in "Oriental Maxims," "Hymns of the Brahmo Somaj, "The Brewing of Soma," "Giving and Taking," and many more, and history, especially that involved with his own religious faith, gave opportunity for "The King s Missive, St. Gregory's Guest," "Banished from Massachusetts," "The Two Elizabeths, "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim."

Yet, as we suggested above, the most constant strain, after all, was that which found so full expression in "The Eternal Goodness." So pervasive in Whittier's mind was this thought of God that it did not so much seek occasion for formal utterance, as it used with the naturalness of breathing such opportunities as arose, touching with light one theme after another, and forming, indeed, the last whispered voice heard from his lips, "Love to all the world."

It was a serene life of the spirit which Whittier led m the closing years of his lire, and he was secure in friendship and the shelter of home. He read, he saw his neighbors and friends, he wrote letters, he took the liveliest interest in current affairs, and was,