g a cork on the point of a sword. It is
pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
gift.

This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
we think, pleasantly, with the war-like clang of "From Perugia." The
years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ has
quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
so true to the present.

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The History of Herodo