Boston Bard, whilom obtained
from newspaper-columns that concession which gods and men would
unanimously have denied him.

George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on
established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him
crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it
might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea."
There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in
the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture,
and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias
Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is
something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of
the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as
they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate
for the waste of human life as the journal of an average Quaker.
Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing
springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.

Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who
can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she
made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice
between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the
whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He
sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the
Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires
them for all that, calls on his countrymen as

"Sons of men who sat in council with their
Bibles round the board,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a
stern 'Thus saith the Lord,'"

and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than
with Mary Dyer. Indeed,

"Sons of men who sat in meeting with their
broadbrims o'er their brow,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a
_thee_ instead of _thou_,"

would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit
that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his
strait-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now
and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.
He makes _abroad_ rhyme with _God_, _law_ with _war_, _us_ with _curse_,
_scorner_ with _honor_, _been_ with _men_, _beard_ with _shared_. For
the la