Waterbury evening Democrat., 1907-12-31
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pEssIMIsTIc n,agazinist de-

" pEssIMISTIC n,agazinist de-
 N rlared recently that all the
 truly great English writing poets were produced about a century ago and tfiar almost imrae- diateiy afterward nature went out of .ha poet producing business. Of course this cann& he true of Britain, which bora successive crops of singers of the first quality long before the time of Tennyson and the Brownings and the others of the Victorian period, but it applies fairly well to America. The group of American poets who made American poetry what 1t is came into being during the early years of the last century The noblest company of singers on which the sun has ever snone-Bryant, Emerson. Poe Longfellow, Lowell. Holmes, Whittier! Time has not clouded the lenses through which we view the magnitude of their part in the urhuilding of American literature. It : has cleared them and brought into closer range the splendor of their ac- complishment.
 And now the centenaT1es of these men who have never died. although their worn bodies have returned to the Mother Earth whence they sprang, are falling thick and fast. Bryant is the only one among them who belongs to the eighteenth century. Emerson, born in 1903, has entered on his second century of expanding fame. The witty and genlal Holmes, born in 1909; Poe, dreamy and norbidly clairvoyant, born in 1911, and Lowell, scholar and man of the world, will be remembered lit- tie further on. Longfellow's first cen- tury was celebrated in February of the present year. The hundredth anniver- SaTv of the birth of John C Whittier "sss celebrated December IT.
 A clever essayist has called Whittier "lhe Bobby Burns of New England" equally entitled to the appellation of "the Whittier of Scotland" which di- viles the honors and makes everything entirely satisfactory. It means also that precisely as Burns was the ac- credited singer of the soil that bore him Whittier became and will always remain the poet of New England life of the nineteenth century. In the first half or the last century New England was conspicuously a part of the repub- lie in which intellectual and spiritual life among the common people had been most continuous and well nour- iplitd. It was thoroughly fertilized, so to speak, by generations of mental &C., 1vity and was ready to bear the nat aral product of the vitalized soil-the man of letters, the master of verbal forms and the expounder of ideals.
 "Of them all" declares his biogra- sher, whittier was the most widely and profoundly and permanently rep resentative of the common people of ais locality. : His habits, his cir cumstances and all his interests bound him to the land and life of the peo- pie. :" x Whittier alone was country born and bred. a countryman in edu- cation and sympathies A Haverhill boy, an Amesbury man, he never broke himself the slightest ties that bound him to his family and his neighbors. His power of expression was his own, but his life and his thoughts were as theirs, and he thus became directly typical of his town and his district and indirectly typical of all the country folk of his race and his. nation who lived the same simple life based on the old polity ef the Puritan community"