The period in Whittier's life from about 1858 to 1868 we may call the Ballad Decade,[26] for within this time were produced most of his immortal ballads. We say immortal, believing that if all else that he has written shall perish, his finest ballads will carry his name down to a remote posterity. "The Tent on the Beach" is mainly a series of ballads; and "Snow-Bound," although not a ballad, is still a narrative poem closely allied to that species of poetry, the difference between a ballad and an idyl being that one is made to be sung and the other to be read: both narrate events as they occur, and leave to the reader all sentiment and reflection. [Footnote 26: The beginning of this decade nearly coincides with the fourth or final period in our classification, upon the consideration of which we shall now enter.] * * * * * The finest ballads of Whittier have the power of keeping us in breathless suspense of interest until the _denouement_ or the catastrophe, as the case may be. The popularity of "Maud Muller" is well deserved. What a rich and mellow translucence it has! How it appeals to the universal heart! And yet "The Witch's Daughter" and "Telling the Bees" are more exquisite creations than "Maud Muller": they have a spontaneity, a subtle pathos, a sublimated sweetness of despair that take hold of the very heart-strings, and thus deal with deeper emotions than such light, objective ballads as "Maud Muller" and "Skipper Ireson's Ride." But the surface grace of the two latter have of course made them the more popular, just as the "Scarlet Letter" finds greater favor with most people than does "The House of the Seven Gables," although Hawthorne rightly thought the "Seven Gables" to be his finest and subtlest work. * * * * * Mark the Chaucerian freshness of the opening stanzas of "The Witch's Daughter":-- "It was the pleasant harvest time, When cellar-bins are closely stowed, And garrets bend beneath their load, And the old swallow-haunted barns-- Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams Through which the moted sunlight streams. And winds blow freshly in, to shake The red plumes of the roosted cocks, And the loose hay-mow's scented locks-- Are filled with summer's ripened stores, Its odorous grass and barley sheaves, From their low scaffolds to their eaves." A companion ballad to "The Witch's Daughter" is "The Witch of Wenham," a poem almost equal to it in merit, and like it ending happily. These ballads do not quite attain the almost supernatural simplicity of Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" and "We are Seven"; but they possess an equal interest, excited by the same poetical qualities. "Telling the Bees," however, seems to the writer as purely Wordsworthian as anything Wordsworth ever wrote:-- "Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"