These dreams and perceptions made him the poet of New England idyls, as did his spiritual inspiration of her ideals. He looked with anointed eyes upon her woods and fields, her hills and streams and her rocky coast. It was first through Burns and then through his own life that he sang: “Yet on life’s current, he who drifts Is one with him who rows or sails; And he who wanders widest lifts No more of beauty’s jealous veils Than he who from his doorway sees The miracle of flowers and trees, Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air And from cloud minaret hears the sunset call to prayer!” He sings the beauty in brooks and fields, the oneness that pervades all nature, and how to the opened eyes, “From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles, And Rome’s cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles.” This world of beauty in everyday life Whittier has revealed to those who do not travel; he has opened their eyes to perceive how great are their possessions, not in the far-away, nor in the future, but here and now. Other poets may arouse longings for the unattainable; but Whittier has shown us how the manna of life lies at our own doors waiting for us to gather. Burns with inspired lyre sings of the daisy and the mouse, of the Doon and the Ayr, of men and of his “Highland Mary.” Whittier sings of flower and tree and field, of mountain and river, of men and women. But over all his pictures arches the depth of the sky giving them perspective and illumination. When he sings of the sea, “The ocean looketh up to God As ’twere a living thing; The homage of its waves is given In ceaseless worshipping.” And of life’s trials, “... darkness in the pathway of man’s life Is but the shadow of God’s providence By the great Sun of Wisdom cast thereon.” To his ears is attuned the music heard through the silences, how “The harp at Nature’s advent strung Has never ceased to play; The songs the stars of morning sung Has never died away.” Before his eyes, “The green earth sends her incense up;” and to his vision, “The mists above the morning rills Rise white as wings of prayer;” to him “The blue sky is the temple’s arch.” What poet paints nature with a truer touch than he? To him the universe is one thought of God; to him all Nature is informed, not as by the many gods of Polytheism; but by a reverent Monotheism, by the touch of the All-Father and the response of a sentient world. “So Nature keeps the reverent frame With which her years began, And all her signs and voices shame The prayerless heart of man.” What artist ever drew with brush a more perfect picture of midsummer heat than Whittier in his prelude to the poem, “Among the Hills”: “The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, Unfelt.”