The record-union., 1892-11-03

SACRA
was recognized as a sincere and helpful
friendship between an honest. earnest
man and one of Americas noblest types
of womanhood.
Ii is well that, in this age of lieentious-
ness and poetic license when even the
author Of the Light of ASIA sullies his
title OF nobleman by indulging IN low
amours with the dancing girls Of Japan, a
great poet whose austere life has been
passed in tiercer light than ever beat
upon throne. should leave behind him
an honorable record of rugged, manly
virtue.
ct no man among the many who have
set their thoughts to rhyme had greater
chaflty for human frailties than he.
quote Irom his poem on Burns:
Lament who viii the rbald line
hich tells his lapse from duty,
How kissed the maddeniug lips of wine
or wantUn ones OF beauty;
But think While tai s that shade between
The erring one ana Heaven
That he who loved like Magdalen,
Like her may be forgiven.
After the publication of his first volume
OF poems reviewer in the -4hdntc
Honthty, at that day an authority upon
literature, wrote contemptuously of his
ankee rhymes and cited string of
unmuslcal combinations, such as morn
with dawn" but the poet survived the
critic. and the proem to his later volumes
contains the following apologetic stanza /:
The haIshness OF a Northern cline,
The rudeness of an untaught ear
The iarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor's hurried time,
Or Duty rugged march through storm and
strife,
Are here.
n;eroo1; =, L. ar e4t-.:,, 4,
essence of refined sarcasm: 'To-morrow
the critics will begin. You know who the
critics are? The men who have failed in
literature and art"
Fortunately critic spleen did not drive
our poet Of the people to an early grave,
as 1t did poor Keats.
There is an entire absence of wit or
humor in Whittier's poesy, and in this re-
spect he resembles that suffering prince
OF good fellows, Charles Lamb. One fails
70 discover even in his most ambitious
flights any suggestion of his having been
"a midnight student DER the dreams of
sages." He quaffed his inspirational
draughts from the fount of nature, and
he says in the Barefoot Boy":
Eschewng books and tasks.
Nature answers all he asks.
And the charm OF his song is due to that
hermit-like simplicity that found in wild
tive whispers of the wind among the
pines, Of his native State a deathless
melody that he so happily translated.
r. Ii. Stoddard says:
Ne whom the crowded city holds
whose feet have worn its stony highways,
Familiar with its loneliest streets.
Its ways are never my ways.
And the ways of the city and the world
had no charms for the Quaker poet.
Unlike Bryant, Lowell, Longfellow.
Holmes and Emerson, he never left the
shores OF his native land, and he tells us:
know not how in other lands
The changing seasons come and go,
What splendOr falls on Syrian sands
Or purple light on Alpine snow:
Nor with what pomp the sunrise waits
on Venice at her watery gates,
dream to me is Amos vale
And the Alhambras halls are but a travellers
tale
After the correspondence between Car
lyle and Emerson was published. Whit
tier, shocked by the cheerful frankness
with which these two intellectual giants
discussed the men and measures of their
time, ordered all of his private corre-
spondence to be burned, thus DESTROYING
a valuable record of his personal observa-
tions during the exciting times through
which he passed, for surely the associate
of such men as Garrison, Phillips. and
the coterle of writers before mentioned.
the Carey sisters, and all the brilliant
galaxy OF stars that glowed in the tirma-
ment of literature that have now dark led
into space, must have written his impress
sions in enduring prose.
AS a rule poets have been but indiffer-
ent letter writers, and there is a notable
example of one who descended to abso-
lutte IdIocy in letters to the lady who later
became his wife, and though many CEN
sure her for publishing that humiiiating
record of her husbands folly in a spirit
OF revenge, yet few can repress a smile al
lhe Thought OF Bulwer subscribing HIM
sell as 'oor own itty puppy doggie,' y
after writing the object of his alteration
pages of ridiculous baby talk, and per-
haps Whittier may have dreaded some
mortitying publicity that cannot now
take place.
Whittier's love for his kindred was
strong and true, and one might run the
whole gamut Of literature and find nc
more beautiful tribute of brotherly re-
gard than the allusion to his sister Eliza
beth, the poetess, which occurs in
Snow bound":
., heart sore tried, thou hast the best
1nat Heaven Itself could give thee-rest;
fest from all bitter thoughts and things
How many poor ones blessing went
With thee beneath the low green tent
whose curtain never outward swings
With the exception of the poem en-.
titled My Namesake'' one cannot dis.
cover the slightest trace Of egotism in his
Writings, and that is SO truthful picture
of the poet that the reader forgets the
slight transgression of good taste:
Some blamed him, some believed him good
the truth lay, doubtless, twixt the two
He reconciled as best he could
Old iaith and fancies new.
His innate modesty and sterling poo6
sense placed him above the batteries O
the multitude. 1t was impossible tC
liOnize him; he would not ''crool1 the
pregnant hinges of the knee that thrift
might follow tawning' before wealth
nor yet with demagogic subtleties de-
scend to vulgar flatUery to win the ap.
plause of the masses.
FOR him was 10 Countess of Blessing
ton thrOned in a chair of gold-hued satin
surrounded by brilliant satellites, radiant
lovely, bewitching, scintillating with wit
from whom he could by magnetic
prompting derive new inspiration. We
cannot learn that he ever attended the
receptions of the Carey sisters in New
York, where in emulation of the Gore
House, the wit and wisdom Of the day
congregated to exchange ideas and to re-
ceive that adulation SO dear to that strange
mixture OF egotistic vanity, the rhym-
ster.
Whitier's death, if we ignore Aldrich
and Holmes, has closed the most remark
able era of literary activity that the world
has known. AS Mr.. Castle lately wrote,
The pigmies have followed the giants.'