One who could utter this amazing verdict upon the “Psalm of Life” certainly seems less fitted for poetry than for journalism and politics: and indeed Whittier’s aptitude for affairs, even at twenty-one, was extraordinary. His political editorials for the “Manufacturer”—a Clay journal which advocated a protective tariff—were skilfully written from the first. Subsequent editorial engagements in Haverhill, Hartford, and Philadelphia, although rendered brief by his wretched health, nevertheless widened his acquaintance and increased his self-confidence. His judgment was canny. His knowledge of local conditions, at first in his native town and county, and afterward throughout New England and the Eastern States, was singularly exact. He seemed to perceive, as by some actual visualization, how people were thinking and feeling in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other communities which he had observed at first hand; and he employed a correspondingly accurate and as it were topographical imagination when he wrote of affairs in Kansas, Paris, or Italy. Men were never abstractions to him. They were concrete persons, with ambitions to be tempted, generosities to be wakened, weaknesses to be utilized. His own county of Essex was then, as now, noted for the adroitness of its politicians, but at twenty-five John Greenleaf Whittier could beat the best of them at their own game. He was tireless in personal persuasion, in secret correspondence, in fighting fire with fire. He read Burke, and was prompt to apply Burke’s principle: “When bad men combine, the good should associate.” A Whig himself until the formation of the Liberty party, he was willing, as his friend Garrison was not, to compromise on non-essentials for the sake of bringing things to pass. The hand of a master is revealed in his published letters to Caleb Cushing and to Henry Clay. It was he who devised the coalitions which sent Cushing, the Whig, and Rantoul, the Democrat, to Congress, which made Boutwell governor of Massachusetts and sent Sumner to the United States Senate. When Sumner was struck down in the Senate chamber and his indignant constituents held mass meetings to voice their horror, Whittier was self-controlled enough to declare: “It seems to me to be no time for the indulgence of mere emotions.... The North is not united for freedom as the South is for slavery.... We must forget, _forgive_, and UNITE.” No utterance could be more characteristic of the man. In public affairs he knew what he wanted to compass, and he was as willing to lobby or to trade votes as to write an editorial or a lyric, provided the good cause could be thereby made to prosper. Extremists thought that he yielded to considerations of mere expediency; but his was rather the versatility of the born political fighter, who can use more weapons than one. Underneath all questions of policy, lay his inherited democratic sympathy with the ordinary man. At the height of his fame he loved to