, to English working-men by Whittier's
co-religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is probably
_Maud Muller_, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. _Skipper
Ireson's Ride_ is also very current. Better than either of them, as
poetry, is _Telling the Bees_. But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a
descriptive and reminiscent kind is _Snow-Bound_, 1866, a New England
fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the _Winter Evening_ of
Cowper's _Task_ and Burns's _Cotter's Saturday Night_, but in sweetness
and animation is superior to either of them. Although in some things a
Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a
Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject
of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts. The most impressive
of these is _Cassandra Southwick_. The latest of them, the _King's
Missive_, originally contributed to the _Memorial History of Boston_ in
1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has
been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. The _Bridal of
Pennacook_, 1848, and the _Tent on the Beach_, 1867, which contain some
of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators,
after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. As an
artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or
rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the
eight-syllabled rhyming couplet--

"Maud Muller on a summer's day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do
some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from
affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in
part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical
equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are
not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an
artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," which give
his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.
Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a
besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme
and meter, ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly
contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches
of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery
and folk-lore of the Merrim