All this was justifiable, though it frequently was anything but high art. At times, however, the heat of passion led Whittier to write lines for which there was little or no excuse. His disappointment at Webster's famous "Seventh of March" compromise speech in 1850 led him to the extreme of reproach which was felt by most of the North--an extreme from which he shared the common reaction of later years and for which he made the manly atonement of "The Lost Occasion," moved by "the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness." The lowest level of his war verse is reached in the most familiar "Barbara Frietchie." This has all the attributes that are usually to be found in popular favorites. It is conventional in form, easily intelligible, a narrative of picturesque tableaux, and capped with an applied moral. The only charge that can be fairly brought against it is, however, a fundamental one--that it is essentially false to the facts. The middle third of the poem that has to do explicitly with Stonewall Jackson is partly libelous and partly ridiculous. Jackson was an honest and devoted man, but he is represented as coming through the town like a stock-melodrama villain, blushing with remorse at the challenge of Barbara and capping the climax with a burst of cheap and unsoldierly rhetoric. No doubt it expressed at the moment what the passions of war could lead even a gentle Quaker to believe; no doubt also it was good war journalism; but granting these concessions, it stands as a deplorable evidence of the depths to which noble talents can be degraded in the times that try men's souls. "The Waiting," a poem of 1862, is in the loftier vein of one who does not reënforce himself through disparagement of his enemies. It is a lament of unfulfilled endeavor in behalf of an ideal cause. As a really great lyric should be, it is both personal and general in its application. It expresses the despondency of the enfeebled and aging poet that he could not join "the shining ones with plumes of snow" in the good fight; and in its reference to "the harder task of standing still" it alludes not only to his resignation at the moment but also to the patient policy which in former years had estranged the extremest abolitionists from him. It also must have been an immediate source of consolation to thousands who have been confronted by urgent duties they could not perform; while at the same time in a broader way it has expressed the faith of "Ulysses" and "Abt Vogler," of "In Memoriam" and "Saul" and "Asolando," that "good but wished with God is done."