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Now and then there may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery, but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind. "Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern ballads.
Above and beyond the forest's utmost reaches rise the mountain crags and peaks, every angle rounded into gentle contours beneath its burden of snow. Along the margin of the Lake appear the habitations and works of men deeply buried and snow-hooded until they recall the scenes in Whittier's Snow Bound.
"I further ordered," he writes, "one thousand copies of A. Grimké's letter, with your introductory remarks, and your address published in the Liberator several weeks since, with your name appended, and Whittier's poetry on the times, in a pamphlet form. I urged all our friends to redouble their exertions.
The only machinery in the room was a hydraulic arrangement for pressing the cloth into bales, managed by two or three men, one of whom was quite a poet, and a fine singer also. His hymns were frequently in request, on public occasions. He lent me the first volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It was a small book, containing mostly Antislavery pieces.
Charlie wondered what they would do with so many watermelons when they ripened; there would be hundreds of them; and the mouths that were to eat them, although now watering for the delicious fruit, were not numerous enough to make away with a hundredth part of what would be ripe very soon. There was no market nearer than the post, and there were many melon-patches between Whittier's and the fort.
If Emerson's philosophy was like the diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army, Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that blasted forever all compromise and expediency. Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement.
And no country is of much interest until legends and poetry have draped it in hues that mere nature cannot produce. We looked at Nahant for Longfellow's sake; we strained our eyes to make out Marblehead on account of Whittier's ballad; we scrutinized the entrance to Salem Harbor because a genius once sat in its decaying custom-house and made of it a throne of the imagination.
Children in the third year of school who are reading Whittier's Barefoot Boy ought to be able to recognize and spell the word robin; perhaps, also, woodchuck and tortoise; but eschewing is not a part of their vocabulary and will not soon be, and probably the less said about that word by the teacher the better.
Belle entered Pauline's room to find her cousin revelling in the exquisite pathos of Whittier's Snowbound before dressing for dinner. The problem of clothes had been solved by Aunt Rutha in her pleasant, tactful way.
In his last volume several of her poems were published, which are quite worthy the place the brother's appreciation has given them. Whittier's love and reverence for his mother and sister, so marked in every word and look, were charming features of his home life. All his poems to our sex breathe the same tender, worshipful sentiments.
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