d has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a
hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.

WHITTIER

IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS

It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
disperse itself.