,--and of the moral sentiment, not
in its flexible, feminine, vine-like dependence and play, but in its
masculine rigor, climbing in direct, vertical affirmation, like a
forest-pine. In this respect he affiliates with Wordsworth, and, going
farther back, with Milton, whose tap-root was Hebrew, though in the vast
epic flowering of his genius he passed beyond the imaginative range of
Semitic mind.

In thus identifying our bard, spiritually, with a broad form of the
genius of mankind, we already say with emphasis that his is indeed a
Life. Yes, once more, a real Life. He is a nature. He was _born_, not
manufactured. Here, once again, the old, mysterious, miraculous
processes of spiritual assimilation. Here, a genuine root-clutch upon
the elements of man's experience, and an inevitable, indomitable
working-up of them into human shape. To look at him without discerning
this vital depth and reality were as good as no looking at all.

Moreover, the man and the poet are one and the same. His verse is no
literary Beau-Brummelism, but a _re_-presentation of that which is
presented in his consciousness. First, there is inward vital conversion
of the elements of his experience, then verse, or version,--first the
soul, then the body. His voice, as such, has little range, nor is it any
marvel of organic perfection; on the contrary, there is many a voice
with nothing at all in it which far surpasses his in mere vocal
excellence; only in this you can hear the deep refrain of Nature, and of
Nature chanting her moral ideal.

We shall consider Whittier's poetry in this light,--as a vital
effluence, as a product of his being; and citations will be made, not by
way of culling "beauties,"--a mode of criticism to which there are grave
objections,--but of illustrating total growth, quality, and power. Our
endeavor will be to get at, so far as possible, the processes of vital
action, of spiritual assimilation, which go on in the poet, and then to
trace these in his poetry.

God gave Whittier a deep, hot, simple, strenuous, and yet ripe and
spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first, that it _must_
lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly,
that it _must_ work these up into some form of melodious completeness.
History and the world gave him Quakerism, America, and Rural Solitude;
and through this solitude went winding the sweet, old Merrimac stream,
the river that we would not wish to forget, even by