Whittier wrote many fine short lyrical poems, such as _Ichabod_, _The Lost Occasion_, _My Playmate_ (which was Tennyson's favorite), _In School Days_, _Memories_, _My Triumph_, _Telling the Bees_, _The Eternal Goodness_, and the second part of _A Sea Dream_. His narrative poems and ballads are second only to Longfellow's. _Maud Muller_, _Skipper Iresons Ride_, _Cassandra Southwick_, _Barbara Frietchie_, and _Mabel Martin_ are among the best of these. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS--Whittier and Longfellow resemble each other in simplicity. Both are the poets of the masses, of those whose lives most need the consolation of poetry. Both suffer from diffuseness, Whittier in his greatest poems less than Longfellow. Whittier was self-educated, and he never traveled far from home. His range is narrower than Longfellow's, who was college bred and broadened by European travel. But if Whittier's poetic range is narrower, if he is the poet of only the common things of life, he shows more intensity of feeling. Often his simplest verse comes from the depths of his heart. He wrote _In School Days_ forty years after the grass had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the word which the boy had missed:-- "'I'm sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, Because,'--the brown eyes lower fell,-- 'Because you see, I love you!' * * * * * "He lives to learn, in life's hard school, How few who pass above him Lament their triumph and his loss, Like her,--because they love him." Whittier's simplicity, genuineness, and sympathetic heart stand revealed in those lines. His youthful work shows traces of the influence of many poets, but he learned most from Robert Burns. Whittier himself says that it was Burns who taught him to see "... through all familiar things The romance underlying," and especially to note that "Through all his tuneful art, how strong The human feeling gushes!" The critics have found three indictments against Whittier; first, for the unequal value of his poetry; second, for its loose rhymes; and third, for too much moralizing. He would probably plead guilty to all of these indictments. His tendency to moralize is certainly excessive, but critics have too frequently forgotten that this very moralizing draws him closer to the heart of suffering humanity. There are times when the majority of human beings feel the need of the consolation which he brings in his religious verse and in such lines as these from _Snow-Bound:_-- "Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of Death And Love can never lose its own!"