Suddenly seaward swept the squall; The low sun smote through cloudy rack; The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all The trend of the coast lay hard and black. _Among the Hills_, _Miriam_, and _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ come next in order of publication. The first is a romance of New England country life; the second is ‘Oriental and purely fiction;’ the third, partly historical and partly imaginative, is an attempt to reconstruct life in Penn’s colony towards the close of the Seventeenth Century. Whittier said of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_: ‘It is as long as _Snow-Bound_, and better, but nobody will find it out.’ The poet felt that too little had been said in praise of the humanizing influences at work in the colonies by the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The Pilgrim Father here celebrated is Daniel Pastorius, who planted the settlement of Germantown. He was the first American abolitionist. The poem abounds in happy pictures of scenery, and in tenderly humorous sketches of the quaint characters who found peace, shelter, and, above all, toleration, under the beneficent rule of Pastorius. _The Vision of Echard_ will serve to introduce Whittier’s distinctively religious poems. A characteristic performance, it admirably illustrates his manner, diction, cast of thought. First, the scenes of great natural beauty, where historical memories are overlaid and blended with ideas of ceremonial pomp associated with formal religion; and then, projected on this rich background, the dreamer and his dream. The blended walls of sapphire in Echard’s vision ‘blazed with the thought of God:’-- Ye bow to ghastly symbols, To cross and scourge and thorn; Ye seek his Syrian manger Who in the heart is born. * * * * * O blind ones, outward groping, The idle quest forego; Who listens to His inward voice Alone of him shall know. * * * * * A light, a guide, a warning, A presence ever near, Through the deep silence of the flesh I reach the inward ear. * * * * * The stern behest of duty, The doom-book open thrown, The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear, Are with yourselves alone. Whittier did not include ‘The Preacher’ among his religious poems. This fine picture of the ‘great awakening’ might be so classified. Also ‘The Chapel of the Hermits,’ ‘Tauler,’ and yet others. In general the religious poems consist of meditations on sacred characters and scenes, poetic settings of Biblical narrative, and reflective poems in which Whittier gives voice to phases of his spiritual life, and above all to a faith so broad that the distinctions of sect and creed are lost in its catholic charity. ‘Questions of Life,’ ‘The Over-Heart,’ ‘Trinitas,’ ‘The Shadow and the Light,’ and ‘The Eternal Goodness’ are the expressions of this lofty and inspiring side of his poetic genius.