1872 and 1873. The two New England Tragedies, the first of which had been written in 1856-57, were published in 1868, the Divine Tragedy was written and published in 1871, and the completed Christus in 1872. He wrote Morituri Salutamus,' for the fiftieth anniversary of his college class, and this was published in 1875, in the Masque of Pandora and Other Poems, together with the Hanging of the Crane,' which was written for Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and which holds a peculiar place in Longfellow's work, as summing up within itself so many of the different aspects of home life, of all of which he was the poet laureate.

During this last period of his life, he wrote often in a form which he had hardly more chan once or twice tried before, except for translations, the sonnet. In much of the work of this period, especially the sonnets, his feeling is deeper and stronger (it could not be truer), and his expression richer and more condensed, than before. Longfellow was always a true artist and careful of the form of his work, as few of our American poets, except Poe, have been. The little lyric Sea-Weed,' of an earlier period, shows how carefully and well he could fit the form of his idea to a somewhat intricate stanza. But his art was never rich or varied, and he lacked most of all that tenseness of expression which is the mark of any very strong artistic or imaginative feeling for language. In the sonnets, however, his feeling, now deepened and strengthened by the experiences of his constantly growing life, and by his communion with Dante, was confined within the narrow walls of a form that did not allow it to flow out thin over the marshes of the commonplace, as it had so often done before, and as it did still in the Hanging of the Crane.' There is much of this same strength and condensation in his noble Morituri Salutamus.'

Longfellow's last years were made happier by the devotion of his own children, and by the love of all children who knew him- and it would seem that few in America, or even in England or Germany, did not know him. The story of his gift from the Cambridge schoolchildren on his seventy-second birthday, and of their constant visits to his home, is too well known to be repeated. His seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated in the schools throughout the United States, and was made memorable also by Whittier's poem, "The Poet and the Children.' He died not quite a month later, March 24, 1882.

Longfellow's life was that of a simple, faithful, true man and gentleman, kindly and home-loving. And that is what he has put into his verse. He has been well called 'the laureate of the common human heart.' He is first and most of all the poet of the home. There is not an aspect of home life that he has not touched and beautified. If much of his poetry is mere commonplace, it is always the making beautiful of the commonplace. Bryant's poetry often -as in the well-known lines from 'The Battle-Field,'— and Emerson's still oftener, are the making noble of the commonplace. Whittier's is the simple and true rendering of it. Whitman's is the apotheosis of it. Poe is the only one of our chief elder poets who is not commonplace, who detests and despises the commonplace.

Next, Longfellow is the only American who has successfully written poems of any considerable length. The long poem is different from the short poem, as the novel is from the short story, not only in quantity, but in kind. For those who can conceive only that kind or class of poetry which finds fit expression in the short poem, Poe's dictum that 'there is no such thing as a long poem' is true; for the poem which by its nature belongs to the short poem class, yet tries to extend itself to greater length, is, as Poe saw, inevitably a failure. The long poem is an entirely different literary class or genre. It is Longfellow's distinctive glory that he had the patience and the sustained artistic power to win success in this difficult form, - a kind of success which is almost the rarest in literature, and second only to success in the true dramatic presentation of character and life. Without comparing Longfellow's achievement in this field with that of greater foreign poets, we may say that it alone would give him an unanswerable claim to the largest space in any fully representative collection of our chief American poets.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

WHITTIER is the poet of New England country life, almost as truly and fully as Burns is of the country life of Scotland. For this he was fitted by all the circumstances of his own life. He was born and bred a farmer's boy, on the same farm which his first American ancestor, Thomas Whittier, had taken up and cleared in 1647, and in the very house which this Thomas Whittier had built for himself in 1688. This sturdy pioneer came to New England in 1638, when he was eighteen years old, and so was nearly seventy when he built the house which was to be Whittier's birthplace. Of his ten children, five were boys, and each of the five boys, like his father, was over six feet tall, and strong correspondingly. The youngest son, Joseph, Whittier's great-grandfather, had nine children, of whom the youngest, Whittier's grandfather, married Sarah Greenleaf, and had eleven children, of whom the youngest but one was Whittier's father. There was naturally but little property to divide among so many children, and the older sons usually went out and made their own way in the world, while the farm was left to the youngest in the last case, to the two youngest, Whittier's father and his uncle, Moses Whittier, who is one of the family group in Snow-Bound.'

John Greenleaf Whittier was born December 17. 1807. He lived and worked on the farm, but he lacked the sturdy strength of his ancestors, and the hard work of his early boyhood resulted in physical injury and weakness which lasted for the rest of his life. His education was that of a typical country boy in those days; he attended the district school in the outskirts of the town where he lived, and later earned for himself two short terms at the neighboring academy. Only once in his boyhood did he gɔ so far away from home as to visit Boston. Thus, in ancestry and training, Whittier differs from the other New England poets, who were all college bred, and spent their youth in a city or an academic town. One other important point is to be noted, that Whittier's family were devout Quakers.

Books were naturally scarce in the household, except for the Bible and the lives of Quaker worthies. He read all the poetry he could get hold of, from the dry Davideis ' spoken of in Snow-Bound' to something of Gray and Cowper. He wrote rhymes on his slate after the nightly chores' were done. But his real awakening to poetry came through Burns, as he has told us so vividly and beautifully in his tribute to the Scotch peasant-poet.

Whittier's first printed verses appeared when he was eighteen years old, in the local newspaper, edited by William Lloyd Garrison, then only twenty. Garrison at once sought out his new contributor, and urged the necessity of further education and cultivation of his talent. 'Sir,' replied Whittier's father, 'poetry will not give him bread.' Whittier, however, earned enough by shoemaking to support himself for one term at Haverhill Academy in 1827, and by school-teaching enough for another term in 1828. During these two years he wrote for the local papers, especially the Haverhill Gazette, something like a hundred poems.

A college education seemed out of the question, but Whittier obtained employment in the following winter as hack editor of a Boston trade journal, the American Manufacturer. The following summer his father fell seriously ill, and he had to return home and take charge of the farm. But here he found an opportunity for continuing his other work, in the editorship of the chief local paper, the Haverhill Gazette. His father died in June, 1830. In July he went to Hartford, Conn., to be editor of the New England Review, and continued to conduct it until the end of 1831, although he was compelled to spend a good deal of that year at home in Haverhill, and ultimately to give up his editorial position, on account of serious illness.

In these excursions into the outside world, at Boston, and particularly at Hartford, which was then somewhat of a literary centre, and where he held an important position, Whittier's outlook had of course been greatly broadened, and his literary ambition strengthened. His letters at the time show a strong desire and even hope of winning

fame as a poet. His editorial work had also drawn him into politics, and when he returned to Haverhill, in spite of his ill health, he took an important practical part in the local contests. In September, 1832, he wrote: Even if my health was restored, I should not leave this place. I have too many friends around me, and my prospects are too good to be sacrificed for any uncertainty.' The prospect which he was unwilling to sacrifice was that of being elected to Congress in the following year. It appears that he could probably have been elected in 1832, but he was not yet of the required age.

Both his literary and political ambitions, however, seemed to be once for all sacrificed when, almost by a sort of religious conversion, he devoted himself to the abolition cause. The abolitionists were at that time a small and persecuted band, despised by all respectable' people in church, state, or university, and generally looked on much as an avowed anarchist is now. They were, in fact, setting themselves in opposition to what was then the law of the land, and to what seemed, to Northerners as well as Southerners, part of the very basis of its social and economic system. Whittier had far more common sense and balance than most of the abolitionists in 1833. He counted the cost with Quaker coolness of judgment,' says Pickard, ‘before taking a step that closed to him the gates of both political and literary preferment. He realized more fully than did most of the early abolitionists that the institution of slavery would not fall at the first blast of their horns. When he decided to enter upon this contest, he understood that his cherished ambitions must be laid aside, and that an entire change in his plans was involved. He took the step deliberately and after serious consideration.' What induced Whittier to take this step, even while realizing its cost so clearly, was an intense idealistic belief, a belief amounting almost to religious fervor, in the principle of universal liberty and equality. Late in life, giving counsel to a boy of fifteen, Whittier said, 'My lad, if thou wouldest win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.'

This is not the place to give any extended account of Whittier's work in the abolition movement. It has been treated with admirable completeness and fairness in Professor Carpenter's Whittier. Strange as this seems to us now, Whittier was, aside from his poetry, one of the most able workers in practical politics on the abolition side. He held together a small band of followers in his own congressional district, and kept the balance of power in such a way as often to force anti-slavery declarations from any candidate who wished to be elected. He had taken no part in founding the New England AntiSlavery Society in 1832; but in 1833 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Convention at Philadelphia which founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. (See note on page 260.) He later became somewhat estranged from the purely idealistic faction of the abolitionists, led by Garrison, who refused to have anything to do with a government based, as it seemed to them, on false principles, or even to vote under it, and who advocated immediate dissolution of the Union in order to break away from the slave power. Whittier was elected as representative to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835, and again in 1836, but could not serve his second term on account of ill health, and was unable, for the same reason, to take office himself at any subsequent time. He still continued to play an active part in politics, however, even to the end of his life. He is described in a letter quoted by Professor Carpenter, as one of the greatest workers, politically, even, in all our State. I sometimes wonder how so fine a mind can stoop to such drudgery. But Whittier has as much benevolence as he has ideality. He knows the drudgery must be done, and, since no one else does it, will do it himself. May Heaven bless him.' Whittier was largely instrumental in securing the nomination of Charles Sumner to the Senate, and in persuading him to accept the nomination. His correspondence with Sumner, from 1840 on, is very important for the history of that period. Toward the end of Sumner's life, when he had been censured by the Massachusetts Legislature for advocating the proposal that the names of battles fought against fellow-citizens should no longer be inscribed on regimental flags, it was Whittier who aroused public opinion to compel the repeal of this vote of censure. In 1834 Whittier was instrumental in bringing the English abolitionist, George Thompson, to New England, and this caused bitter personal opposition. He accompanied Thompson to New Hampshire, and at Concord they

were stoned and shot at by a mob, and barely escaped. Whittier went to Philadelphia in 1838, to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman; Pennsylvania Hall, where he had his office, was burned by a mob without interference from the authorities. He took part, from 1835 to 1850, in the editing of several anti-slavery papers, and in many anti-slavery conventions. During all this time, he was a great influence by his poetry also. The ringing lines of 'Expostulation,' and of Massachusetts to Virginia,' were declaimed again and again through the North and West. The anti-slavery movement rapidly grew, and won the allegiance of men like Dr. Channing in 1836, and Lowell in 1841. But it was still the unpopular cause, and abolitionists were mobbed in Massachusetts as late as 1861. Whittier's anti-slavery poems form the larger part of his work for all this period. His earliest volumes were almost entirely made up of them, the Poems, of 1837, the Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., of 1838, and the Voices of Freedom, of 1841. Of course little of this verse can survive, except for its historic interest. Sometimes, however, though local and temporary in its origin, it expresses something universal and eternal, as with the idea of freedom in Expostulation,' of truth and honor and the shame of their betrayal, in Ichabod,' of loathing at the triumph of wrong, in 'The Christian Slave and The Rendition.' Massachusetts to Virginia' is one of the greatest of ' poems of places,' making the very rocks arise and speak.

In the meantime, Whittier was writing other poems, more enduring than the mass of his anti-slavery work. The Lays of my Home was published in 1843, the first collected edition of his Poems in 1849, Songs of Labor in 1850, the Chapel of the Hermits and Other Poems in 1853, the 'blue and gold' edition of his Poetical Works in 1857. Except for the publication of his works, there is little to note in his life-story. He had given up the farm, and moved to a little house in the near-by village of Amesbury, where he lived until 1876. His income was very small, until after the publication of Snow-Bound,' in 1866, for in the earlier years he could necessarily earn but little by his writings. For twenty years,' he said, 'I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and magazine editors; but I was enabled, by rigid economy, to live in spite of them, and to see the end of the institution that proscribed me.' 'Snow-Bound,' and all his later works, brought him large profits.

During the war Whittier wrote little. His feeling is expressed intensely in 'The Waiting' and 'The Watchers,' and he wrote the best ballad of the war in 'Barbara Frietchie.' He hailed the coming of emancipation in Laus Deo' and the Emancipation Hymn.' In 1866 came Snow-Bound,' in 1867 the Tent on the Beach,' in 1869 Among the Hills,' in 1870 the Ballads of New England. These are his most important volumes, and mark his late maturity as a poet, which came only with his freedom from the partisan struggle that had filled the best years of his life.

Hater of din and riot

He lived in days unquiet;
And lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty,

he says truly of himself in 'An Autograph;' while in his Prelude to the 'Tent on the Beach,' he expresses more fully this feeling of what his life had been : —

And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfil,
Had left the Muses' haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion-mill,
Making his rustic reed of song

A weapon in the war with wrong,

Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough

That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.

Too quiet seemed the man to ride

The winged Hippogriff Reform;

Was his a voice from side to side

To pierce the tumult of the storm?
A silent, shy, peace-loving man,
He seemed no fiery partisan

To hold his way against the public frown,

The ban of Church and State, the fierce mob's hounding down.

For while he wrought with strenuous will

The work his hands had found to do,

He heard the fitful music still

Of winds that out of dream-land blew.
The din about him could not drown

What the strange voices whispered down;
Along his task-field weird processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped.

The common air was thick with dreams,
He told them to the toiling crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
Sang in his ear he sang aloud;

In still, shut bays, on windy capes,

He heard the call of beckoning shapes,
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,

To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.

Whittier never married. Circumstances,' he wrote, the care of an aged mother, and the duty owed to a sister in delicate health for many years, must be my excuse for living the lonely life which has called out thy pity. . . I have learned to look into happiness through the eyes of others.' Still more cogent reasons for not marrying were his comparative poverty, his ill health, and especially the strong feeling of the Quakers that it was not permissible to marry out of their own sect. There are beautiful memories of his school-boy loves in poems like My Playmate,' 'Benedicite,' 'A Sea Dream,' Memories,' and In School-Days,' and these poems of dim and delicate reminiscence, untouched by the realities of life, sometimes seem more beautiful than any songs of living passion. His home, for many years, was made by his younger sister, Elizabeth, until her death, in 1864; then by his niece, Elizabeth Whittier, till her marriage, in 1876. After this he lived most of the time with three sisters, his cousins, at Oak Knoll, Danvers. His faculties remained unimpaired to the last, and he died at the age of eighty-four, September 7, 1892.

Whittier was primarily the poet of abolition; but enough has already been said on that part of his work. Next, he was the poet of Nature in New England. His poems of the Merrimac Valley, of Lake Winnipesaukee and the mountains near it, of Hampton Beach and the Marblehead coast, are unsurpassed in simple truth and love. But most of all he is the poet of country life in New England. This means more than at first appears, for it was from these New England homes that the larger number and the more energetic of the young men, like the older brothers of Whittier's father and grandfather, went out to take and make the great Northwest and then the greater West; moreover Whittier, in speaking for his own section, often expresses what the whole of America is and means as contrasted with the Old World, — in 'The Last Walk in Autumn,' for instance. There are two or three other points to be noted in summary. One is the simple beauty, truth, and modesty of Whittier's own nature, constantly and unconsciously showing itself in his many personal poems, and in his modest estimate of his own work, as in the 'Proem.' Another is that he ranks as our truest, though not our greatest, narrative poet. This has already been touched on in speaking of Longfellow; as a writer of ballads, Whittier surpasses Longfellow in everything except that which is after all the first essential, but only one essential, spirited movement. And finally, he is our chief religious poet.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

HOLMES was a great believer in ancestry, and very proud of his own. Through his mother he was connected with the Phillipses, and was a cousin of Wendell Phillips; with the Bradstreets, and was a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess; with the Quincys, and was the great-grandson of Dorothy Q.;' with the Hancocks, one of whom had married the second Dorothy Quincy, niece of the first; and with the Wen