Part 15

_The Stranger in Lowell_, a volume of more or less related essays, is in part a record of impressions made on the author during a brief residence in the new manufacturing town by the Merrimac. The extraordinary growth of ‘The City of a Day’ was then, and is still, a legitimate cause for wonder. All the eighteen papers are readable, and that entitled ‘The Yankee Zincali’ is a little classic. Whittier’s next volume of prose, _The Supernaturalism of New England_, consists of nine chapters on witches, wizards, ghosts, apparitions, haunted houses, charms, and the like. It is rather a wide survey of the subject, from the Indian powahs to the Irish Presbyterians who settled in New Hampshire in 1720, and brought with them, ‘among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies.’ Whittier dwells on these traditions of his country with deep interest and sets them forth with no little humor. It is a fault of the book that he does not dwell on them at greater length.

_Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal_ is an admirable study of colonial New England in 1678. The style is sweet, the narrative flowing, the characters, many of them historical, are consistent and lifelike, and the tone of delicate irony running through the book is most engaging. Genuinely illuminating to the student of manners are such passages in the journal as those describing the ordination of Mr. Brock at Reading, the meeting at the inn with a son of Mr. Increase Mather, ‘a pert talkative lad’ abounding in anecdotes of the miraculous, the antics of Mr. Corbet’s negro boy Sam, and the encounter on the way back to Boston with the good old deacon under the influence of flip. A strong and engrossing plot might have made the book more popular, as it might also have been inconsistent with the artlessness of what purports to be a young girl’s journal.

_Old Portraits and Modern Sketches_ is a volume of character studies of ancient worthies (such as Bunyan, Ellwood, Baxter, Marvell) and of two or three moderns (like William Leggett, to whom Whittier pays a generous tribute). _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_ consists of a reprint of material used in earlier books, together with a group of reviews and other papers.

IV

NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY VERSE

Whittier’s instinct drew him irresistibly to native themes. He believed that the American poet should write about America. ‘New England is full of Romance,’ he had said in his sketch of Brainard. ‘The great forest which our fathers penetrated--the red men--their struggle and their disappearance--the Powwow and the War-dance--the savage inroad and the English sally--the tale of superstition, and the scenes of Witchcraft,--all these are rich materials of poetry.’ And it is safe to assume that Whittier never questioned the wisdom of his own choice of subjects, though he was often dissatisfied with the treatment.

Much of Whittier’s early verse died a natural death. More ought in his opinion to have done so. He marvelled at the ‘feline tenacity of life’ exhibited by certain poems and thought it flat contradiction of the theory of the survival of the fittest. He destroyed every copy of _Legends of New England_ that he could get his hands on. He would have been glad to suppress _Mogg Megone_. ‘Is there no way to lay the ghosts of unlucky rhymes?’ he asked, when the question was raised of reprinting the story in the ‘blue and gold’ volumes of 1857. It had appeared in the first collected edition (1849), and again in 1870; but when the definitive edition was published (1888), _Mogg Megone_ was consigned to ‘the limbo of an appendix,’ and printed in type small enough to make the reading a torture.

The plot is imaginary, but the characters are for the most part historical. The outlaw Bonython sells his daughter to the Saco chief Hegone, or, as he was commonly called, Mogg Megone. The girl murders the savage as he lies drunk in her father’s hut. For Mogg had boasted of killing her seducer. She flies to the settlement of the Norridgewock Indians to confess to the Jesuit Sebastian Ralle, and is repulsed by the angry priest, whose plans are thwarted by Megone’s untimely death. Wandering about in agony, she sees the attack by the English on Norridgewock, when Ralle was shot at the foot of the cross, and later is found by Castine and his men, dead in the forest. The poem is spirited and abounds in incident, but it is melodramatic. It lacks the magic of Whittier’s art. Nevertheless he unjustly depreciated it.

A better performance is ‘The Bridal of Pennacook,’ with its strongly marked characters of Passaconaway, Weetamoo, and Winnepurkit, its contrasting pictures of the rich Merrimac valley and the wild Saugus marshes. Along with this story of Indian life may be read ‘The Fountain’ and the musical stanzas of the ‘Funeral Tree of the Sokokis.’ ‘The Truce of Piscataqua’ and ‘Nauhaught, the Deacon’ are later poems illustrating Indian character.

Living in what had been for many years one of the border towns of Massachusetts, Whittier was naturally drawn to themes, partly historic,

## partly legendary, touching the struggles between French, English, and

Indians. ‘Pentucket’ commemorates Hertel de Rouville’s night attack on Haverhill. ‘St. John,’ a ballad of Acadia, describes the sack of La Tour’s fortress by his rival, D’Aulnay. ‘Mary Garvin’ and ‘The Ranger’ are ‘border’ ballads.

Now and then he rhymes ‘a wild and wondrous story,’ such as ‘The Garrison of Cape Ann,’ which he found in the _Magnalia Christi_:--

Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of old, Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean and coarse and cold; Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar clay, Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden gray.

A number of the poems turn on the witchcraft persecutions: ‘Mabel Martin,’ ‘The Witch of Wenham,’ and the fine ‘Prophecy of Samuel Sewall.’ In _The Tent on the Beach_ are two more: ‘The Wreck of the Rivermouth’ and ‘The Changeling.’

Whittier was always ready to speak on the injustice of injustice. His Quaker ancestors used to receive gifts of forty stripes save one. They were martyrs for the cause of religious liberty. And the sufferings of the New England Quakers was a subject always to the poet’s hand. He contemplated the wrongs that had been righted and was grateful therefor; but it was a part of his mission to teach his readers what progress had been made since the days in which state and church united to persecute a harmless if sometimes extravagant people. The lesson may be found in such poems as ‘How the Women went from Dover’ and ‘The King’s Missive.’ Whittier knew that injustice is always ridiculous, and a grim humor plays at times about his treatment of events in that dreadful day, as in the story of Thomas Macy. The most characteristic setting of his general theme is to be found in the spirited ballad of ‘Cassandra Southwick.’ The incident is told dramatically by the heroine herself, but the passion which glows through the verse is true Whittier.

V

_VOICES OF FREEDOM_, _SONGS OF LABOR_, _IN WAR TIME_

The militant note in Whittier’s verse was sounded early. In 1832, when he was twenty-five years old, he wrote the stanzas ‘To William Lloyd Garrison.’ They were followed by ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (1833), ‘The Slave-Ships’ (1834), ‘The Hunters of Men’ and ‘Stanzas for the Times’ (1835), ‘Clerical Oppressors’ (1836), and the stinging ‘Pastoral Letter’ (1837). He was now fairly embarked on his mission.

The brunt of his attack fell on supine Northern politicians, clerical apologists, and anxious business men who feared agitation might injure their Southern trade. Nothing was more abhorrent to Whittier than traffic in human flesh. He marvelled that it was not abhorrent to every one, and strove with all his power to make it so. America, in his belief, was a by-word among the nations, forever prating of ‘liberty’ while she bought and sold slaves.

As he was the assailant of timid vote-seekers, money-getters, and ministers who defended slavery ‘on scriptural grounds,’ so was Whittier the eulogist of all who made sacrifices for the cause, or who, like ‘Randolph of Roanoke,’ a man with every traditional motive to cling to the peculiar institution, testified against it. _Voices of Freedom_ is a record of the guerilla warfare which Whittier waged during forty years against slavery. With the additions he made to it in the progress of the struggle, it became not only the largest division of his work but one of the most notable. The history of Abolitionism is written here. ‘The Pastoral Letter’ was Whittier’s response to the body of Congregational ministers who deprecated the discussion of slavery as tending to make trouble in the churches. ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ was called out by Latimer’s case. ‘Texas,’ ‘Faneuil Hall,’ and the lines ‘To a Southern Statesman’ are a protest against the annexation of territory ‘sufficient for six new slave states.’ ‘For Righteousness’ Sake’ was inscribed to friends ‘under arrest for treason against the slave power.’ The fine closing stanza deserves to be better known:--

God’s ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait. Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Ye have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!

‘The Kansas Emigrants’ celebrates the Western advance, the coming of the new Pilgrims, armed with the Bible and free schools. ‘Le Marais du Cygne’ was written on hearing of the Kansas massacre in May, 1858. ‘The Quakers are Out,’ a campaign song (not included in the collected writings), celebrates the Republican victory in Pennsylvania on the eve of the National election:--

Away with misgiving--away with all doubt, For Lincoln goes in, when the Quakers are out!

Not the least notable among these poems is ‘The Summons,’ in which the poet contrasts the quiet of summer with the distant tumult of approaching war, and his knowledge of his place in the approaching struggle with consciousness of his inability to act.

The Voices of Freedom are often harsh and discordant. Lines were written in hot haste and sent to press before the ink had time to dry. The needs of the moment were imperative. There was little time to correct and no time to polish. Had Whittier possessed a lyric gift approximating that of Hugo or Swinburne, how wonderful must have been his contribution to our literature. For the cause was great and his devotion single. Much of the verse, however, is journalism.

He rises easily to poetic heights. ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ has a magnificent swing and pulsates with passion. When Webster’s defection spread anger, consternation, and grief through the ranks of the party of Freedom, Whittier penned the burning stanzas to which he gave the title ‘Ichabod.’ This anti-slavery poem was published in _Songs of Labor_, and is justly accounted one of the loftiest expressions of Whittier’s genius.

_In War Time and Other Poems_ records the anxieties, fears, hopes, and exultations incident to the great conflict between North and South. Says the poet:--

‘... our voices take A sober tone; our very household songs Are heavy with a nation’s griefs and wrongs; And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake Of the brave hearts that nevermore shall beat, The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning feet!’

The volume contains ‘Barbara Frietchie,’ perhaps the most popular ballad of the war, based on an incident told to Whittier by Mrs. Southworth, the novelist. One must reconstruct the times to comprehend the extraordinary effect produced by this dramatic little incident. Iconoclasts have made havoc with the story. If their points are well taken, we have one proof more of the superiority of legend over history for poetic purposes. Other noteworthy poems in this volume are ‘Thy Will be Done’ and the magnificent hymn ‘Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott.’

We wait beneath the furnace blast The pangs of transformation; Not painlessly doth God recast And mould anew the nation. Hot burns the fire Where wrongs expire; Nor spares the hand That from the land Uproots the ancient evil.

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.

X

_Nathaniel Hawthorne_

REFERENCES:

=Julian Hawthorne=: _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, second edition, 1885.

=Horatio Bridge=: _Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 1893.

=G. E. Woodberry=: _Nathaniel Hawthorne_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1902.

I

HIS LIFE

Among the passengers in the ship which brought Winthrop and Dudley to the New World was William Hathorne, the ancestor of the novelist. A man of character, versatile, naturally eloquent, and a born leader, he rose to a position of influence in the colony. One of his sons, John Hathorne, was destined to sinister renown as a judge at the trials for witchcraft held at Salem in 1691.

Daniel Hathorne, a grandson of the old witch judge, took to the sea, and during the Revolutionary War served as a privateersman. He had seven children. Nathaniel, his third son, also a sea-captain, married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, and became the father of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the novelist, who was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804.

Captain Hawthorne died at Surinam in 1808. The rigid seclusion in which his widow lived after her husband’s death had a marked effect on her son, quickening his sensibilities and at the same time clouding his lively nature with a shadow of premature gravity.

Hawthorne’s boyhood was passed partly at Salem, partly on the shores of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. His reading for pleasure included Clarendon and Froissart, to say nothing of that old-time boys’ delight, the Newgate Calendar. The first book that he bought with his own money was Spenser’s _Faery Queen_. At sixteen he had read _Caleb Williams_, _St. Leon_, and _Mandeville_. ‘I admire Godwin’s novels and intend to read all of them.’

He entered Bowdoin College in the same class with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, and was graduated in 1825. For the next twelve years he lived the life of a recluse in his own home at Salem, indulging his passion for writing and for taking twilight walks. It was the period of his literary apprenticeship. Later he was, as he says, ‘drawn somewhat into the world and became pretty much like other people.’ In 1828 he published, anonymously and at his own expense, a novel, _Fanshawe_. He made some mystery about it, binding by solemn promises the few who were in the secret of the authorship, not to betray it. The public was indifferent to the book, and Hawthorne afterwards destroyed the copies he could find. His early sketches and stories were published in annuals such as ‘The Token,’ and in periodicals such as ‘The New England Magazine,’ ‘Knickerbocker,’ and ‘The Democratic Review.’ For the most part they ‘passed without notice.’

In 1837 appeared a volume of eighteen of these sketches and stories, to which Hawthorne gave the title of _Twice-Told Tales_. An enlarged edition, containing twenty-one additional stories, appeared in 1842. Between the two, Hawthorne brought out a group of children’s stories, _Grandfather’s Chair_, _Famous Old People_, and the _Liberty Tree_, all in 1841, and _Biographical Stories for Children_, 1842.