outgrown their youthful pleasure in
"Maidenhood," "The Rainy Day," "The Bridge," "The Day is Done," verses
whose simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as
"The Belfry of Bruges," "Seaweed," "The Fire of Driftwood," "The Arsenal
at Springfield," "My Lost Youth," "The Children's Hour," and many
another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately
infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry,
but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often
be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple,
graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste,
especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be
running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say.
Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster
Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland
boy.

Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced
people who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf
Whittier an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet.
One can almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in
that silent laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's
Leather-Stocking. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better
artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker
of public opinion, how variable are its judgments. Whittier represents
a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American,
equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts.
The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been
built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in
Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two
generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it had in
Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even the door-stone
and bridle-post and the barn across the road are witnesses to the
fidelity of the descriptions in "Snow-Bound." The neighborhood is still
a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a few
great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an
old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the
Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence."
The taciturn father transmitte