lf" as a poet. It is true that his style
remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now
uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and
thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil,
his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of
his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses,
but spirited "Songs of Labor," pictures of the lovely Merrimac
countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and
bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went
abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading,
and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest
interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and
section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held
its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns
are sung today in all the churches.

When "The Atlantic Monthly" was established in 1857, Whittier was fifty.
He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as
a controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as
"Tritemius," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride." Characteristic productions of
this period are "My Psalm," "Cobbler Keezar's Vision," "Andrew Rykman's
Prayer," "The Eternal Goodness"--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it
was not until the publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 that Whittier's
work touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths
of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate
Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East
Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and
the poet, nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of
the vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted
to his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound,"
nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to
the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely
charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius
recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England
hearthside.

Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived
to be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative
period was now over. He rejoiced in the frien