Chapter John Greenleaf Whittier of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

ardor of conflict and sent immediately into print without the opportunity to meditate and correct. Waiting and The Watchers are among the best of these war lyrics; while in Barbara Frietchie the poet produced what is often described as the finest ballad of the struggle, although the story told in the poem is now discredited. Laus Deo, the most stirring of these lyrics, has an interesting history. It was composed while the poet was sitting in the Friends' Meeting-House in Amesbury, at the regular Fifth Day meeting, listening to the bells of jubilation which announced the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, January 31, 1865.

"It is done!
Clang of bell and roar of gun
Send the tidings up and down."

"All sat in silence, but on his return to his home, he recited a portion of the poem, not yet committed to paper, to his housemates in the garden room. `It wrote itself, rather sang itself, while the bells rang,' he wrote to Lucy Larcom."¹

Snow-Bound.

In 1866, Whittier published his masterpiece, Snow-Bound, a Winter Idyl. This beautiful poem is a thoroughly realistic picture of the farm in the grasp of a New England winter. The family circle grouped in homely comfort about the roaring fireplace is that of the poet's own frugal home, but it is typical of rural life in the New England of the sixties; and the portraits are representative of the sturdy class to which the poet's family belonged. Snow-Bound takes its legitimate place beside Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Burns's The Cotter's Saturday Night. In Whittier's poem, the personal element is strong. The devoted sister, Elizabeth, "our youngest and our dearest," had died in 1864; perhaps it was this event which had stirred the poet's memories of childhood -- certainly it was the inspiration of the tenderest passage in the poem. Snow-Bound brought its author his first substantial pecuniary returns. The sales were very large; from the first edition he received $10,000, and the financial burden of many years was permanently removed.

The Tent on the Beach.

The large success of Snow-Bound was repeated a twelvemonth later, when the collection of narrative poems entitled The Tent on the Beach appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. When the latter poems were published in book form they began to sell at the rate of a thousand copies a day. "This will never do," wrote the poet in humorous self-depreciation to his publisher, James T. Fields; "the swindle is awful; Barnum is a saint to us." The comrades of the Beach were the poet himself, Mr. James T. Fields, and the noted traveler as well as all-around man of letters, Bayard Taylor. The poems thus grouped in the manner of Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), are sombre in tone, sad stories of ill-fated ships and legends of the days of delusion; no one of them has gained a strong hold on popular favor. The descriptions of the sea, and the familiar portrait of the poet--

"And one there was, a dreamer born,
   Who, with a mission to fulfil,
Had left the Muses' haunts to turn
   The crank of an opinion-mill"¹--

these are the happiest touches in the work.

Successive volumes of his verse continued to appear at frequent intervals during the remainder of Whittier's life. He was an old man in his eighty-fifth year, universally venerated, when the final volume was published.

At Sun-down.

During these latter years the poet lived a retired and peaceful life, impelled thereto by delicate health and the natural shyness of his disposition. Yet he never lost interest in public affairs or his active sympathy with the ultimate results of that cause which had enlisted his energies in youth. The education of the freedmen in the South, the assistance of individuals who had made their way to the North, were matters of vital interest to him. He continued to make his home in Amesbury, but visited with friends in Hampton Falls, or with relatives at Oak Knoll in Danvers. There was a quiet corner in the White Mountains where