What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least of all able to give him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven him to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely poetical in stronger relief--a purely literary canon which would have offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him (and his essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to write of Longfellow's _Psalm of Life_: "These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live--the moral steam enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tradition had not entirely died out in America that the first proof of genius is an abandonment of one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." Byron had written verse as vacillating and formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley had poured forth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keats learned the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; Wordsworth indulged in platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but none of these poets suffered so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the finest of our New England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their licence, were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of Whittier's muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace joys and cares of the heart needs above all to attain that _simplex munditiis_ which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general collection of his poems, he wrote: Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, No rounded art the lack supplies; Unskilled the subtle line to trace, Or softer shades of Nature's face, I view her common forms with unanointed eyes. Nor mine the seer-like power to show The secrets of the heart and mind; _To drop the plummet line below Our common world of joy and woe, A more intense despair or brighter hope to find._ But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward is not that he showed "a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he developed the peculiarly English _ideal of the home_ which Cowper first brought intimately into letters, and added to it those _homely comforts of the spirit_ which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined to throw the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy and woe."