there in all this no discipline
of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the
exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans
had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons
provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives
were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But
beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech,
in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search
the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of
wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by
Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption,
from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and
grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and
neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too
physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has
embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his
forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused
(as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his
ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked
responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the
only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure,
as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand."
This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his
ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm.
Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac
rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven
generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious
and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature
perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national
experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in
broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and
yet are unutterably strange!

To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word,
represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is
very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the
affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that
Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain
farmhouse kitchen i