the narrow, high, and strangely receding forehead. His
language, very fluent and easy, had an agreeable touch of the soil, an
occasional rustic note in its elegant colloquialism, that seemed very
pleasant and appropriate, as if it linked him naturally with the long
line of sturdy ancestors of whom he was the final blossoming. In
connection with his poetry, I think it would be difficult to form in
the imagination a figure more appropriate to Whittier's writings than
Whittier himself proved to be in the flesh."

WHITTIER'S UNCOLLECTED POEMS

IV

WHITTIER'S UNCOLLECTED POEMS

Between the years 1826 and 1835, Mr. Whittier was writing literally
hundreds of poems which he never permitted to be collected in any
edition of his works; and not only so, but he preserved no copies of
them, in later years destroying such as came to his notice. Some of
these verses went the rounds of the newspaper press of the country,
giving him a widespread reputation as a poet. But in much of his early
work we see traces of ambition for fame, and a feeling that the world
was treating him harshly. When the change came over his spirit to which
reference has been made in a preceding chapter, sweetening all the
springs of life, he lost interest in these early productions, some of
which were giving him the fame that in his earlier years he so much
craved. It was this radical change which no doubt influenced him in his
later life to omit from his collected works most of the verses written
previous to it. I have in my possession more than three hundred poems
which I have found in the files of old newspapers, the great mass of
which I would by no means reproduce, although I find nothing of which a
young writer of that period need be ashamed. A few of these verses are
given below as specimens of the work he saw fit to discard.

The following poem, written when he was nineteen years of age, during
his first term in the Haverhill Academy, shows in one or two stanzas
the feeling that the world is giving him the cold shoulder:--

I WOULD NOT LOSE THAT ROMANCE WILD

I would not lose that romance wild,
That high and gifted feeling--
The power that made me fancy's child,
The clime of song revealing,
For all the power, for all the gold,
That slaves to pride and avarice hold.

I know that there are those who deem
But lightly of the lyre;--
Who ne'er have felt one blissful beam
Of song-enki