While far on the opposite side There is told a wonderful tale, But the young grew old and gray, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) Whittier was a Quaker. He early came in contact with the poetry of Robert Burns, and sang the country life of New England as the Ayrshire poet sang that of Scotland. He lived on a farm and was educated as a country boy. At eighteen his first printed poem appeared in a local newspaper, the Newburyport Free Press. William Lloyd Garrison was the editor and befriended Whittier. He helped him get his schooling. Whittier afterward held editorial positions in Boston, Haverhill, and Hartford. He became identified with the Anti-Slavery movement, and believed flamingly in universal liberty and equality, but his judgment in action was cool. Mogg Megone was his first appearance in bookform. He wrote many pamphlets and poems on the Abolition question and was prominent in the cause politically. He served in the Massachusetts legislature and edited the Pennsylvania FreeIn 1840 he retired to Amesbury and spent the rest of his life in that vicinity. The Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857 and Whittier became one of its most valued contributors. In all he published some twenty-six volumes of poems and wrote, edited, and compiled numerous other works. man. Whittier was an honest and religious man of high spiritual integrity. His faults as a poet are those of didacticism and propaganda, but the New England of his day had no truer interpreter. His power of description and narrative ability are often notable. He too sometimes shares "the marvelous gift . . . with him who walked on Rydal-side" for interpreting nature. He was an occasional writer of Biblical eloquence. For the Lord On the whirlwind is abroad; In the earthquake he has spoken; And the gates of brass are broken! He strikes one as a more vehement spirit than Longfellow, even though his ballads are inferior in sustained interest. His work smells far less of the lamp and the upholstery of the comfortable study. He was a rugged and song-sworded apostle with a tougher spirit. You will often find banality and sentimentality in his work but his like in religious fervor, expressed in poetry often noble and deeply moving, cannot be found to-day. TELLING THE BEES * HERE is the place; right over the hill You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook. There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard, There are the beehives ranged in the sun; And down by the brink Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun, A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze; * The poems by John Greenleaf Whittier are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. Tangles his wings of fire in the trees, I mind me how with a lover's care I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair, Since we parted, a month had passed,— To love, a year; Down through the beeches I looked at last On the little red gate and the well-sweep near. I can see it all now,-the slantwise rain The sundown's blaze on her windowpane, Just the same as a month before, The house and the trees, The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,Nothing changed but the hive of bees. Before them, under the garden wall, Forward and back, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Trembling, I listened; the summer sun For I knew she was telling the bees of one Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps The fret and the pain of his age away." But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill, The old man sat; and the chore-girl still And the song she was singing ever since "Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! MOTHER From "Snowbound" OUR mother, while she turned her wheel At midnight on Cocheco town, |