"Though Poe was a Southerner, his poetry has nothing in it suggestive of his peculiar locality. It is somewhat remarkable that the slave-holding, which has tried almost all other means of excusing or justifying itself before the world, did not think of 'keeping a poet,' and engaging the destitute author from its own territory to sing the praises of 'the patriarchal institution.' And it would have been a fair provocation that the Abolitionists had their poet already. Indeed several of the northern poets have touched upon this subject; Longfellow, in particular, has published a series of spirited and touching anti-slavery poems; but the man who has made it his _specialité_ is JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, a Quaker, literary editor of the _National Era_, an Abolition and ultra-Radical paper, which, in manful despite of Judge Lynch, is published at Washington, between the slave-pens and the capitol. His verses are certainly obnoxious to the jurisdiction of that notorious popular potentate, being unquestionably 'inflammatory, incendiary, and insurrectionary,' as the Southern formula goes, in a very high degree. He makes passionate appeals to the Puritan spirit of New England, and calls on her sons to utter their voice, ... From all her wild green mountains, From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie, From her blue rivers and her welling fountains, And clear cold sky-- From her rough coast, and isles, which hungry Ocean Gnaws with his surges--from the fisher's skiff, With white sails swaying to the billow's motion Round rock and cliff-- From the free fireside of her unbought farmer, From her free laborer at his loom and wheel. From the brown smithy where, beneath the hammer, Rings the red steel-- From each and all, if God hath not forsaken Our land and left us to an evil choice;-- "and protest against the shocking anomaly of slavery in a free country. At times, when deploring the death of some fellow laborer in the cause, he falls into a somewhat subdued strain, though even then there is more of spirit and fire in his verses than one naturally expects from a follower of George Fox; but on such occasions he displays a more careful and harmonious versification than is his wont. There is no scarcity of these elegies in his little volume, the _Abolitionists_, even when they escape the attentions of the high legal functionary already alluded to, not being apparently a long-lived class. "_Toujours perdrix_ palls in poetry as in cookery; we grow tired after awhile of invectives against governors of slave-states and mercenary persons, and dirges for untimely perished Abolitionists. The wish suggests itself that Whittier would not always 'Give up to a party what is meant for mankind,'