And the thoughts of youth are long, long Strange to me now are the forms I meet

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,

And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.

And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate, 10
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long While the eternal ages watch and wait.

thoughts.

WEARINESS1

O LITTLE feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;
I, nearer to the wayside inn

Where toil shall cease and rest begin,

Am weary, thinking of your road!

O little hands! that, weak or strong,
Have still to serve or rule so long,

Have still so long to give or ask;
I, who so much with book and pen
Have toiled among my fellow-men,

Am weary, thinking of your task.

O little hearts! that throb and beat
With such impatient, feverish heat,

Such limitless and strong desires;
Mine, that so long has glowed and burned,
With passions into ashes turned,

Now covers and conceals its fires.

O little souls! as pure and white

And crystalline as rays of light

Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,
How red my setting sun appears,
How lurid looks this soul of mine!

DIVINA COMMEDIA2

I

90

20

OFT have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;

1 From Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863. When the Tales now comprising "Part First" of this group were published in that year the volume contained also seven short poems, of which Weariness was the last.

2 These sonnets were published in the three volumes of Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy, the

With snow-white veil and garments as of O star of morning and of liberty!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

Whittier was born in a farm-house near Haverhill, Massachusetts, on 17 December, 1807. The house had been built by a Puritan ancestor in the seventeenth century; it was Whittier's horae until his thirtieth year; it provided the setting for Snow-Bound; and it still stands, converted now into a memorial of the poet. The character of Whittier's boyhood life can best be gathered from SnowBound, perhaps the one flawless poem which he wrote, and a faithful picture of that New England country life which is historically of fundamental importance in the development of America. It was a life meager enough, with its full share of physical work and, too, of hardship, with the slightest of opportunities for culture, but with large opportunities for the development of firm and sound-if somewhat narrow and harsh-character. Whittier's family belonged to the Society of Friends, and the household's small library, of about thirty volumes, consisted exclusively of Quaker literature and the Bible. The boy attended country schools, when any of those nearby were open, and, for the rest, read and re-read his father's few books. It is recorded also that when he was fourteen one of his teachers read to him some of the poems of Burns, which made a deep impression upon him in their revelation of what poetry could do in so transforming surrounding nature and the common and familiar aspects of human life as to give them beauty and an ideal significance. From Whittier's acquaintance with Burns, indeed, may be dated the first beginnings of his poetical life, and within a few years he was firmly fixed in the habit of scribbling verses. The first of these to be printed was sent by his sister, without Whittier's knowledge, to The Free Press, of Newburyport, and the youth was surprised when, in the summer of 1826, he discovered his poem in that paper. It was a paper recently established by William Lloyd Garrison, who became sufficiently interested in Whittier to search him out upon his father's farm, and who urged him to continue his education at an academy which had just been opened in Haverhill. There were both religious scruples and financial difficulties to be contended against, but Whittier managed to spend two terms at the academy, which completed his formal education. His acquaintance with Garrison was the beginning of a life-long friendship, and he was very soon enlisted heart and soul in the cause of abolition, which inspired much of his verse from this time until the slaves were emancipated. The example of Garrison, too, played a part in leading him into journalism, and in the earliest years of his manhood he cherished political ambitions. These, however, he unhesitatingly sacrificed as soon as it became evident that a political career was incompatible with a bold stand against slavery. From 1828 until 1840 Whittier held a number of editorial positions in various places, besides traveling much and working hard for the cause of abolition, but in the latter year his health, never strong, broke down so alarmingly as to force him into a less active life. In 1836, when the Haverhill farm had been sold, he had purchased a house in Amesbury, and he now made this his home for the remainder of his long life. From 1847 to 1860 he was associated with The National Era, a weekly in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published. After 1857 the periodical in which the greater number of his poems appeared was The Atlantic Monthly. He died while visiting in New Hampshire on 7 September, 1892.

Whittier was greater as a man than as a poet--so admirable and high-minded a man, indeed, that criticism would fain shirk the ungrateful task of passing judgment upon his literary performance. But it is true that very many of his poems were occasional in character and have not kept their interest, and that others made their initial appeal to a taste scarcely mature. Whittier once asserted that Longfellow's Psalm of Life took a higher rank in his estimation than "all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth," and thus he betrayed his own misfortune as a poet. He was too often careless of the niceties of expression, he tended to be diffuse, and he did not care to avoid didacticism. Some of his religious verse, not primarily or at all didactic, deserves to live, and may in the long run prove more grateful reading than perhaps at present would be generally granted. But the number of his poems which, like Snow-Bound, live securely from their intrinsic worth, is small, and their author can hardly be regarded as other than a minor figure in literature. "Whittier is probably," says a sympathetic writer, "no more than a poet of the third rank. His native endowment was rich, but

it was supplemented by neither the technical training nor the discipline required for the development of the artist. . . . The organ voice and the lyric cry were not, except at rare moments, his to command. But no American who lived in the shadow of slavery and internecine strife, none who grew to manhood in the generation succeeding those epic days, would dream of measuring his love and veneration for Whittier by the scale of absolute art." (W. M. Paine, Camb. Hist. Am. Lit., II.)