To sum up now our analysis of the poet's character. We have seen that the central trait of his mind is love of freedom. (Even his religion, which is so profound an element in his nature, and so all-pervasive in his writings, will be found, on a deep analysis, to be a yearning for freedom from the trappings of sense and time, in order to attain to a spiritual union with the Infinite.) This love of freedom, this hatred of oppression, intensified by persecution, both ancestral and personal, stimulated by contact with Puritan democracy, as well as by the New England Transcendental movement, and flowering out luxuriantly in the long struggle against slavery,--this noble sentiment, and that long self-sacrificing personal warfare in behalf of the oppressed, form the true glory of Whittier's character. Shy, timid, almost an invalid, having a nervous horror of mobs and personal indignities, he yet forgot himself in his love of Man, overcame and underwent,--suffered social martyrdom for a quarter of a century, never flinching, never holding his peace for bread's sake or fame's sake, not stopping to count the cost, taking his life in his hand, and never ceasing to express his high-born soul in burning invective and scathing satire against the oppressor, or in words of lofty hope and cheer for the suffering idealist and lover of humanity, whoever and wherever he was. Whittier is a hero as well as a poet. He will be known to posterity by a few exquisite poems, but chiefly by his moral heroism and patriotism. As a thinker and a poet he belongs, with Bryant and Longfellow, to the pre-scientific age. The poetry of the future (of the new era of self-consciousness) will necessarily differ widely from that of the first half of this century. It will not be distinctively the poetry of Wordsworth, or Cowper, or Byron, or Longfellow, or Whittier. When the present materialistic and realistic temper of mind disappears from literature, and really noble ideal poetry returns, it will be vast in its scope and range, robust in its philosophy, unfettered by petty rhymes and classicisms, but powerfully rhythmic and harmonious. The writings of Shakspere, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hugo, Tennyson, Whitman, and Emerson are the magnificent proem to it. It will be built upon a scientific and religious cosmism. It will not discuss Apollo and Luna and Neptune, and the nymphs and muses, but will draw its imagery from the heaven-staining red-flames of the sun, the gulfs of space, the miracles of organic and inorganic life, and human society. It will draw its inspiration not more from the storied past than from the storied future foreseen by its prophetic eye. It will idealize human life and deify nature. It will fall in the era of imagination. (After it will come another age of criticism.) It will fall in the age of splendid democracies. And in that age men will look back with veneration, not so much, perhaps, to the scholar-poets as to the hero-poets, like Whittier,