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1 The Lake of the Hills' is Lake Winnipesaukee. One of Whittier's favorite resorts was West Ossipee, at the foot of the Ossipee Mountains, just northeast of the lake. See Pickard's Whittier-Land, pp. 109-115; his Life of Whittier, vol. ii, p. 669; and Whittier's 'Among the Hills' and 'Summer by the Lakeside.'

2 Mt. Chocorua, north of West Ossipee, the most picturesque, though by no means the highest, of the mountains of New England. Its cone is formed of a peculiar reddish stone known as Chocorua granite.' For the legend of the Indian chief from whom it was named, see Thomas Starr King's The White Hills, or Sweetser's White Mountains, p. 341. See also Whittier's How They Climbed Chocorua' in Whittier-Land, pp. 111-114. One of Longfellow's early poems, Jeckoyva,' had the Indian chief Chocorua for its hero.

3 The name Winnipesaukee is popularly thought to mean The Smile of the Great Spirit.' Students of the Indian languages, however, agree that its real meaning is Beautiful Water in a High Place.'

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1 This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the Seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the Compromise,' and the Fugitive Slave Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary my admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the great senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my protest.

But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in The Lost Occasion,' I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of Liberty and Union, one and inseparable.' (WHITTIER.)

'Ichabod' and 'The Lost Occasion' (p. 348) should necessarily be read together. The best possible comment on the two poems, from the point of view of to-day, is that of Professor Carpenter: Those whom Whittier knew best in later life relate that he came eventually to feel that Webster was perhaps right and he wrong; that compromise meant weary years of waiting, but that the further and consistent pursuit of such a policy might have successfully avoided the evils of war and of reconstruction. However that may be, the verses [of 'Ichabod '] are, in their awful scorn, the most powerful that he ever wrote. Right or wrong, he spoke for a great part of the North and West, nay, for the world. For the poem, in much the same fashion as Browning's Lost Leader,' is becoming disassociated with any special name, and may thus remain a most remarkable expression - the most terrible in our literature of the aversion which any mass of people may feel, especially in a democracy, for the once-worshipped leader whose acts and words, in matters of the greatest public weal, seem to retrograde.' (Carpenter's Whittier, pp. 221-222.)

Compare Emerson's Webster,' p. 61, and the note on it; and Holmes's 'The Statesman's Secret,' and The Birthday of Daniel Webster.' See also Pickard's Life of Whittier, vol. i, pp. 327-328.

For the meaning of the title, see 1 Samuel iv, 19-22: 'And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel.' It may have been suggested by an anonymous article of Lowell's on Daniel Webster, in the Anti-Slavery Standard (June, 1846), in which he says: Shall not the Recording Angel write Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom?' (Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 201.)

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Befit his fall!

Oh, dumb be passion's stormy rage,
When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age,
Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
A bright soul driven,
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
From hope and heaven!

Let not the land once proud of him
Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,
Dishonored brow.

But let its humbled sons, instead, From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead, In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains ;

A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled :

When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame ;

Walk backward, with averted gaze, And hide the shame!

1850.

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1850.

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