st two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest
we can make no terms whatever,--they must march out with no honors of
war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give
a flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs from
Lowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect.

But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other
and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the
heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil
might have made him a Burns or a Beranger for us. New England is dry
and hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the
magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets,
"You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women,--in short, the
entire outfit of Shakspeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and
when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of
approval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the same
here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his
being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in
history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of
thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an
ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like, (and
our orators are not too bashful,) we may be as free and enlightened as
we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may
be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to
the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little
of that marvellous Bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer
issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a
fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they
disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did
they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous
attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor
hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the
goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.

Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of

"The rigor of our frozen sky,"

and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual
atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists
complain that i