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                    JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

                 His Life, Genius, and Writings

                     BY W. SLOANE KENNEDY

      Author of a "Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," Etc.

                     REVISED AND ENLARGED


    _INTRODUCTION BY REV. S. F. SMITH, D.D._
    Author of Hymn "America"


    Such music as the woods and streams
    Sang in his ear, he sang aloud

            _The Tent on the Beach_


    For all his quiet life flowed on,
      As meadow streamlets flow,
    Where fresher green reveals alo
      The noiseless ways they go

            _The Friend's Burial_


    CHICAGO NEW YORK
    THE WERNER COMPANY

    COPYRIGHT 1892
    BY D. LOTHROP COMPANY

    COPYRIGHT 1895
    BY THE WERNER COMPANY

    John Greenleaf Whittier





INTRODUCTION.


Who does not admire and love John Greenleaf Whittier? And who does not
delight to do him honor? He was a man raised up by Providence to meet an
exigency in human history, and an exigency in the experiences of the
United States. And he met the exigency with distinguished success. He
was a true exponent of New England life and the New England spirit. He
drew his inspiration from the soil where he was born, from the
necessities of the times, from the demands of human rights, from the
love of God and of man. He was a unique man. We knew not his like before
him. We shall see no other like him after him. He was the product of his
age; and the age in which he lived belonged to him, and he to and in it.
He was a unique literary man. He was so meek and retiring; he was so
keenly sensitive to the wrongs done by man to man; he was so devoid of
self-seeking; so pure and exalted in motive, and so sturdy a defender of
the rights of the oppressed; he was so full of trust in God that we seem
never to have seen his equal among men. His beautiful gentleness of
character and his inflexible and fearless advocacy of the cause of
righteousness--even when such advocacy involved persecution and
personal harm and loss, a rare combination of qualities--remind us of
the sentiment of Oliver Wendell Holmes,

    "The gentle are the strong."

If ever in modern days the character of the apostle John has been
reproduced among men it was in John G. Whittier. See with what sweetness
and meekness the shy and loving Quaker moved through the ranks of
society in times of peace and prosperity, and with what an adamantine
boldness and bravery he stood up before the mob in Philadelphia when his
types and manuscripts were scattered, his printing office burned and
himself threatened with personal violence by the foes of human equality
and freedom. Did he quail before the storm? Not he. Did he abandon his
principles and retire from the arena? Oh, no; no more than did the
apostle John--the apostle of love--forsake his Christian faith when the
persecutors immersed him in boiling oil and exiled him to a desert
island in the AEgean Sea.

The poetry of Mr. Whittier is a complete autobiography. It is a
reflection, as in a polished mirror, of himself. We miss only the
accidents of dates and places, which are of merely external importance;
but we find in his works, amply displayed, the portraiture of the man;
even as the architect records himself and his thoughts in his plans, and
builds his own soul into his edifices. Read the poetry of Mr. Whittier,
and you have no need to ask what kind of man produced it. Behold the
portrait: a thorough New England man, a son of its soil and a legitimate
product of its institutions; a fruit of the simple education which was
open to the people in the times of his youth and manhood; a
philanthropist, loving all righteousness and all men, and scorning all
oppression, injustice and iniquity; a stern advocate of human freedom,
prepared to fight for it even "to the bitter end;" a bachelor, but
having always a sweet and tender side for women; petted by society, but
never tempted to swerve from the straight line of his principles;
holding the faith of his fathers as a birthright and the result of his
honest convictions, but with sympathies as broad as the universe and an
appreciation of the privilege of private judgment on religious matters
as the right and duty of all men; animated by a patriotism which took in
his whole country, but a yearning for his own New England, its people,
its scenery, its institutions and its honor; warmly attached to the
friends whom he met along the pilgrimage of this life, but preserving to
the last the memory and the love of the survivors whom he knew in his
school days in the Haverhill Academy; living very much apart from his
fellow-men, as he did in his latter days, on account of the increasing
infirmities of his age, and absorbed in the world of his own thoughts,
yet ever most affable, and as accessible as a most warm-hearted and
cordial associate; every inch a man, as in stature, so also in soul, but
exhibiting also the simplicity and the loving and confiding spirit of a
child ("of such is the kingdom of heaven"); conscious of his human
weakness and dependence on a higher Power, as he approached the goal of
life, but relying on that higher Power with a sublime courage and a firm
faith. How the man stands forth, like an orator on the stage, in the
