Whittier’s “Home Ballads,” dear for friendship’s sake, though not directly a gift from him, as were some of the former volumes. I wonder if that is what makes me like the songs in the “Panorama,”--some of them--better than anything in this new volume, although I know that this is more perfect as poetry. I doubt if he will ever write anything that I shall like so well as the “Summer by the Lakeside,” in that volume: it is so full of my first acquaintance with the mountains, and the ripening of my acquaintance with him, my poet-friend. How many blessings that friendship has brought me!--among them, a glimpse into a true home, a realizing of such brotherly and sisterly love as is seldom seen outside of books,--and best of all, the friendship of dear Lizzie, his sole home-flower, the meek lily blossom that cheers and beautifies his life. Heaven spare them long to each other, and their friendship to me! But the “Ballads” are full of beauty and of a strong and steady trust, which grows more firmly into his character and poetry, as the years pass over him. “My Psalm,” with its reality, its earnest depth of feeling, makes other like poems, Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” for instance, seem weak and affected. I like, too, the keenness and kindness of the Whitefield poem, in which he has preserved the memory of a Sabbath evening walk I took with him. Dr. Croswell’s poems contain many possibilities of poetry, and some realities; but there always seems to me a close air, as if the church windows were shut, in reading anything written by a devout Episcopalian. Still, there was true Christianity in the man, and it is also in the book. December 27. To-night the telegraph reports the evacuation of Fort Moultrie by the Federal troops by order of the Executive, and the burning of the fort. There’s something of the “spirit of ’76” in the army, surely; South Carolina having declared herself a foe to the Union, how could those soldiers quietly give up one of the old strongholds to the enemy, even at the President’s command? But what will the end be? Is this secession-farce to end with a tragedy? The South will suffer, by insurrection and famine; there is every prospect of it; the way of transgressors is hard, and we must expect it to be so. God grant that, whatever must be the separate or mutual sufferings of North and South, these convulsions may prove to be the dying struggles of slavery, and the birth-throes of liberty.