Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/298

268 memorable odes. But the poet's faith, thought, imagination, are all quickened by his sorrow, so that the "Threnody" is one of the most consolatory as well as melodiously ideal elegies in the language.

Taken for all in all, Whittier, "our bard and prophet best-beloved," '''Whittier's impulsive glow. Cp. "Poets of America": pp. 121-128.''' that purely American minstrel, so virginal and so impassioned, at once the man of peace and the poet militant, is the Sir Galahad of American song. He has read the hearts of his own people, and chanted their emotions, and powerfully affected their convictions. His lyrics of freedom and reform, in his own justified language, were "words wrung from the nation's heart, forged at white heat." Longfellow's national poems, with all their finish, cannot rival the natural art of Whittier's; they lack the glow, the earnestness, the intense characterization, of such pieces as "Randolph of Roanoke," "Ichabod," and "The Lost Occasion." The Quaker bard, besides, no less than Longfellow, is a poet of sympathy. Human feeling, derived from real life and environment, is the charm of "Snow-Bound," even more than its absolute transcript of nature. Years enough have passed since it was written for us to see that, within its range, it is not inferior to "The Deserted Village," "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and "Tarn O'Shanter."

Mark Pattison justly declared that "poets of the first order" always have felt that "human action or