of his best work, were series of ballads told by different
narrators, after the fashion of Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.
As an artist in verse Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than
delicate or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms--by preference the
eight-syllabled rhyming couplet

--"Maud Muller on a summer's day
Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc.--

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do
some of Whittier's mannerisms; which proceed, however, never from
affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in
part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical
equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are
not in dialect, like Lowell's _Biglow Papers_, he knows how to make an
artistic use of homely provincial words, such as "chore," {524} which
give his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.
Whittier's prose is inferior to his verse. The fluency which was a
besetting sin of his poetry when released from the fetters of rhyme and
meter ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly contributions
to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches of English and
American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery and folk-lore of
the Merrimack Valley. Those of most literary interest were the
_Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847, and some of the papers in
_Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854.

While Massachusetts was creating an American literature, other sections
of the Union were by no means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too
raw to add any thing of importance to the artistic product of the
country. The South was hampered by circumstances which will presently
be described. But in and about the seaboard cities of New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond, many pens were busy filling the
columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; and there was a
considerable output, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction,
travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time has already relegated
most of these to the dusty top-shelves. To rehearse the names of the
numerous contributors to the old _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to
_Godey's_, and _Graham's_, and the _New Mirror_, and the _Southern
Literary Messenger_, or to run over the list of authorlings and
poetasters in Poe's papers on {525} the _Literati of New York_, would
be very much like reading the inscriptions on th