Chapter VI

_SNOW-BOUND_, _TENT ON THE BEACH_, _PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM_, _VISION OF ECHARD_

The volume of 1860, _Home Ballads and Poems_, contained two perfect examples of Whittier’s art, namely, ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the Bees.’ To inquire what far-off experiences in the poet’s life prompted the making of these exquisite ‘ballads,’ as Whittier called them, were idle, poets being proverbially given to the use of the imagination. The music of the dark pines on Ramoth Hill could be no sweeter than it is. The theme of either poem is common enough among bards, and perennially attractive. ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the Bees,’ together with ‘Amy Wentworth’ and ‘The Countess,’ all show, though in varying degrees, how pregnant with poetic suggestion were the scenes amid which Whittier passed his life. Even that urban and aristocratic little poem ‘Amy Wentworth’ derives half its charm from the world of associations called up by the fog wreaths, the pebbled beach, and the sweet brier blooming on Kittery-side.

The above-named poems, together with ‘The Barefoot Boy’ and ‘In School-Days,’ suggest a phase of Whittier’s genius which found complete expression in the ‘winter idyl,’ a picture of life in the old East Haverhill homestead.

_Snow-Bound_ was published in 1866. What the author thought of it we now know: ‘If it were not mine I should call it pretty good.’ The public decided for itself and bought copies enough to fatten Whittier’s lean purse with ten thousand dollars. The enviously-inclined should remember that the poet was nearly sixty when this happened to him. A twelvemonth later _The Tent on the Beach_ was published and began selling at the rate of a thousand copies a day. Whittier wrote to Fields: ‘This will never do; the swindle is awful; Barnum is a saint to us.’

Readers who find difficulty in comprehending the enthusiasm that _Snow-Bound_ evoked must reflect that there are strange creatures in the world who actually like winter. For them Whittier had a particular message. He has reproduced the atmosphere of the New England landscape under storm-cloud and falling snow with utmost precision. No important detail is wanting, and no detail is emphasized to the injury of the general effect. The exactness and simplicity of the touch are wholly admirable. The result is as exquisite as the means to it are unostentatious.

_Snow-Bound_ is a favorite because of its homely, sweet realism, because of the poetic glow thrown on old-fashioned scenes, because of the variety of moods (which, lying between the extremes of playfulness and deepest feeling, shade naturally from one to the next); and because of the reverential spirit, the high confidence and trust. The poem is autobiographical, but it needs no ‘key’ to give it interest. The characters are types.

In _The Tent on the Beach_ it is related how a poet,[37] a publisher (who in this instance, contrary to the traditions of his race, is a friend of the poet), and a traveller beguile an evening at the seaside with the reading of manuscript verses from the publisher’s portfolio. The tales, eleven in number, with a closing lyric on ‘The Worship of Nature,’ are too uniformly sombre. The one called ‘The Maids of Attitash’ is blithe enough, but the gray tints need even more relief.

Whittier’s power in descriptions of sea and sky is displayed at its best in this volume. One does not soon forget this stanza from the prelude:--

Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
Stooped low upon the darkening main,
Piercing the waves along its track
With the slant javelins of rain.
And when west-wind and sunshine warm
Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm,
They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers
Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth-flowers!

Even better is the description of the breakers seen by twilight:--

... trampling up the sloping sand,
In lines outreaching far and wide,
The white-maned billows swept to land,
Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and ghostly cavalcade.

The change from the mist and confusion of the brief tempest to the clear after effect was never better rendered:--

Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
The trend of the coast lay hard and black.

_Among the Hills_, _Miriam_, and _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ come next in order of publication. The first is a romance of New England country life; the second is ‘Oriental and purely fiction;’ the third, partly historical and partly imaginative, is an attempt to reconstruct life in Penn’s colony towards the close of the Seventeenth Century. Whittier said of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_: ‘It is as long as _Snow-Bound_, and better, but nobody will find it out.’ The poet felt that too little had been said in praise of the humanizing influences at work in the colonies by the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The Pilgrim Father here celebrated is Daniel Pastorius, who planted the settlement of Germantown. He was the first American abolitionist. The poem abounds in happy pictures of scenery, and in tenderly humorous sketches of the quaint characters who found peace, shelter, and, above all, toleration, under the beneficent rule of Pastorius.

_The Vision of Echard_ will serve to introduce Whittier’s distinctively religious poems. A characteristic performance, it admirably illustrates his manner, diction, cast of thought. First, the scenes of great natural beauty, where historical memories are overlaid and blended with ideas of ceremonial pomp associated with formal religion; and then, projected on this rich background, the dreamer and his dream. The blended walls of sapphire in Echard’s vision ‘blazed with the thought of God:’--

Ye bow to ghastly symbols,
To cross and scourge and thorn;
Ye seek his Syrian manger
Who in the heart is born.

* * * * *

O blind ones, outward groping,
The idle quest forego;
Who listens to His inward voice
Alone of him shall know.

* * * * *

A light, a guide, a warning,
A presence ever near,
Through the deep silence of the flesh
I reach the inward ear.

* * * * *

The stern behest of duty,
The doom-book open thrown,
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,
Are with yourselves alone.

Whittier did not include ‘The Preacher’ among his religious poems. This fine picture of the ‘great awakening’ might be so classified. Also ‘The Chapel of the Hermits,’ ‘Tauler,’ and yet others. In general the religious poems consist of meditations on sacred characters and scenes, poetic settings of Biblical narrative, and reflective poems in which Whittier gives voice to phases of his spiritual life, and above all to a faith so broad that the distinctions of sect and creed are lost in its catholic charity. ‘Questions of Life,’ ‘The Over-Heart,’ ‘Trinitas,’ ‘The Shadow and the Light,’ and ‘The Eternal Goodness’ are the expressions of this lofty and inspiring side of his poetic genius.

Whittier’s singing voice lost none of its flexibility but rather gained as time went on. ‘The Henchman’ was a striking performance for a man of seventy. ‘It is not exactly a Quakerly piece, nor is it didactic, and it has no moral that I know of,’ observed Whittier. He must have known that it had the moral of exquisite beauty. Indeed he admitted that it was ‘not unpoetical.’

His last utterance was a little group of poems, _At Sundown_, having for the controlling thought the close of life’s day. One of them, ‘Burning Drift-Wood,’ was the poet’s farewell; and with the quotation of four of its stanzas we may bring to an end this brief survey of Whittier’s work.

What matter that it is not May,
That birds have flown, and trees are bare,
That darker grows the shortening day,
And colder blows the wintry air!

The wrecks of passion and desire,
The castles I no more rebuild,
May fitly feed my drift-wood fire,
And warm the hands that age has chilled.

* * * * *

I know the solemn monotone
Of waters calling unto me;
I know from whence the airs have blown
That whisper of the Eternal Sea.

As low my fires of drift-wood burn,
I hear that sea’s deep sound increase.
And, fair in sunset light, discern
Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Whittier’s Autobiographical Letter, in Carpenter’s _Whittier_.

[36] The first collected edition made with Whittier’s consent.

[37] Whittier, J. T. Fields, and Bayard Taylor.