Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/123

WHITTIER "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," "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 [109]