"If my health allowed me to write I could make money easily now, as my anti-slavery reputation does not injure me in the least, at the present time. For twenty years I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and magazine editors, but I was enabled by rigid economy to live in spite of them."

His fixed home for almost all of his life was in the valley of the Merrimac River, at East Haverhill, until 1836, and

then at Amesbury, only a few miles east of his birthplace. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Amesbury cemetery. Poetry. Although Whittier wrote much forcible antislavery verse, most of this has already been forgotten, because it was directly fashioned to appeal to the interests of the time. One of the strongest of these poems is Ichabod (1850), a bitter arraignment of Daniel Webster, because Whittier thought that the great orator's Seventh

of March Speech of that year advised a compromise with slavery. Webster writhed under Whittier's criticism more than under that of any other man.

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“... from those great eyes

The soul has fled:

When faith is lost, when honor dies

The man is dead!"

Thirty years later, Whittier, feeling that perhaps Webster merely intended to try to save the Union and do away with slavery without a conflict, wrote The Lost Occasion, in which he lamented the too early death of the great

orator:

"Some die too late and some too soon,
At early morning, heat of noon,
Or the chill evening twilight. Thou,
Whom the rich heavens did so endow
With eyes of power and Jove's own brow,

Too soon for us, too soon for thee,

Beside thy lonely Northern sea,

Where long and low the marsh-lands spread,
Laid wearily down thy august head."

Whittier is emphatically the poet of New England. His verses which will live the longest are those which spring directly from its soil. His poem entitled The Barefoot Boy tells how the typical New England farmer's lad acquired :

"Knowledge never learned of schools,

Of the wild bee's morning chase,

Of the wild flower's time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude

Of the tenants of the wood."

His greatest poem, the one by which he will probably be chiefly known to posterity, is Snow-Bound, which describes the life of a rural New England household. At

the beginning of this poem of 735 lines, the coming of the all-enveloping snowstorm, with its "ghostly finger tips of sleet" on the window-panes, is the central event, but we soon realize that this storm merely serves to focus intensely the New England life with which he was familiar. The household is shut in from the outside world by the snow, and there is nothing else to distract the attention from the picture of isolated Puritan life. There is not another poet

in America who has produced such a masterpiece under such limitations. One prose writer, Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, had indeed taken even more unpromising materials and achieved one of the greatest successes in English romance, but in this special narrow field Whittier has not yet been surpassed by poets.

The sense of isolation and what painters would call "the atmosphere" are conveyed in lines like these:

"Shut in from all the world without,

We sat the clean-winged hearth about,

Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost line back with tropic heat;
And ever when a louder blast

Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught

The great throat of the chimney laughed."

In such a focus he shows the life of the household; the mother, who often left her home to attend sick neighbors,

Some read Snow-Bound for its pictures of nature and some for its still more remarkable portraits of the members.

of that household. This poem has achieved for the New England fireside what Burns accomplished for the hearths of Scotland in The Cotter's Saturday Night.

Whittier wrote many fine short lyrical poems, such as Ichabod, The Lost Occasion, My Playmate (which was Tennyson's favorite), In School Days, Memories, My Triumph, Telling the Bees, The Eternal Goodness, and the second part of A Sea Dream. His narrative poems and ballads are second only to Longfellow's. Maud Muller, Skipper Ireson's Ride, Cassandra Southwick, Barbara Frietchie, and Mabel Martin are among the best of these. General Characteristics. Whittier and Longfellow resemble each other in simplicity. Both are the poets of the masses, of those whose lives most need the consolation of poetry. Both suffer from diffuseness, Whittier in his greatest poems less than Longfellow. Whittier was selfeducated, and he never traveled far from home. His range is narrower than Longfellow's, who was college bred and broadened by European travel. But if Whittier's poetic range is narrower, if he is the poet of only the common things of life, he shows more intensity of feeling. Often his simplest verse comes from the depths of his heart. He wrote In School Days forty years after the grass had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the word which the boy had missed :—