For summarized criticism of Whittier's poetry there are few better passages than his own "Proem" to the collected poems of 1849 and the comment in Lowell's "Fable for Critics," of the preceding year. Whittier acknowledges the lack in his lines of "mystic beauty, dreamy grace" or of psychological analysis converted into poetry; Lowell confirms the judgment with Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of his metre along, The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, Content with the whirl and delirium of song. Whittier lays his best gifts on the shrine of freedom with an avowal of his love for mankind and his hearty and vehement hatred of all forms of oppression, and Lowell properly qualifies the value of these gifts with the statement that the Quaker's fervor has sometimes dulled him to the distinction between "simple excitement and pure inspiration." Whittier deprecates the harshness and rigor of the rhythms which beat "Labor's hurried time, or Duty's rugged march," but Lowell says that at his best the reformer-poet has written unsurpassable lyrics. And both pronounce strictures on his rimes which have been conventionally repeated by most of the later critics who have commented on them at all. Many of Whittier's apparently false rimes, however,--as the author of the "Biglow Papers" should have recognized--are perfect if uttered according to the prevailing pronunciation of his district. Lowell passes for a scrupulous dialect expert when he writes, "This heth my faithful shepherd ben," but Whittier is derided for allowing the same final verb to rime with "Of all sad words of tongue or pen," whereas the sole difference is that one recognized the pronunciation in his spelling and the other took it for granted. If Whittier had employed Lowell's method, in transcribing "Barbara Frietchie," for example, he would have written, Quick, as it fell, from the broken sta'af Dame Barbara snatched the silken sca'af, and he would have concluded with Peace and odda and beauty drawr Reound thy symbol of light and lawr; And evva the stahs above look deown On thy stahs below in Frederick teown! For the _ou_ sounds belong to Essex County, and all the others to Boston and even to hallowed Cambridge. False rimes Whittier wrote in abundance, but by no means all of the apparently bad ones should be condemned at first glance.