In a recent and praiseworthy volume of “The Chief American Poets,” Dr. C. H. Page has included a longer list of selections from Whittier than from Longfellow, although the contributions representing Whittier occupy less space. This is significant. Whittier was mainly a writer of short poems. In the ballad he had a form suited to the general taste, and to his aim of stinging a sluggish populace into revolt against slavery. He painted that institution in its most repellent aspects, seeing nought of the glamour which Southern writers have shed over plantation life as it existed before the war. Living in the North, he saw something of escaping and recaptured negroes. His glance was very direct; he described matters simply; he accomplished the task that he set himself. Among his lyrics of the war, “Barbara Frietchie” is altogether the best known--not with complete justice to others, for example “The Watchers.” To his treatment of tales and legends of colonial New England Whittier brought an inveterate hatred of persecution and oppression in every shape. Accordingly, many of his narratives, like “Cassandra Southwick,” touch on wrongs attempted or inflicted upon the early Quakers. As an interpreter of colonial life Whittier comes second only to Hawthorne. As a herald of the beauty in flower and hill and stream, in “The Trailing Arbutus,” “Among the Hills,” “The Merrimac,” he is second to none in America. True, he does not always refrain from what Ruskin has called the pathetic fallacy, so that he descries in the face of nature moods that are really in the heart of man; but he does this more rarely than his contemporaries. In his revelation of humble and rustic types, “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “The Huskers,” he is almost the equal of Burns or Wordsworth. He is not their rival in perfection of style. More frequently than they he suffers from a bad line; and his rhymes are often defective. Yet one must not conclude that he was inattentive to technique. On the contrary, Whittier was a born artist. But the nice discipline of the ear which so many English poets have owed to the cultivation of Greek and Latin prosody was not vouchsafed to him; and for his manner he missed the advantage of rigorous criticism. The positive excellence of Whittier’s verse is due to the harmonious blending and interworking in him of varied powers. His senses were alert and sure, his humour was fine, his intellect strong, his pathos firm. He was not afraid of a theme that was tragic. His realism might be compared to that of Crabbe, but it is more hopeful. In his religious poems there is a belief more satisfying than transcendental pantheism; and there is a quality of personal joy and optimism which, as we have previously observed, is not typical of American literature. Best loved and saintliest of our singing train, Earth’s noblest tributes to thy name belong. A lifelong record closed without a stain, A blameless memory shrined in deathless song.