ain we stretch our eager hands,--
Cold in his wintry shroud he lies
Beneath the dreary drifting sands!

Ah, speak not thus! _He_ lies not there!
We see him, hear him as of old!
He comes! he claims his wonted chair;
His beaming face we still behold!
His voice rings clear in all our songs,
And loud his mirthful accents rise;
To us our brother's life belongs,--
Dear boys, a classmate never dies!

WHITTIER.

It was some ten years ago that we first met John Greenleaf Whittier, the
poet of the moral sentiment and of the heart and faith of the people of
America. It chanced that we had then been making notes, with much
interest, upon the genius of the Semitic nations. That peculiar
simplicity, centrality, and intensity which caused them to originate
Monotheism from two independent centres, the only systems of pure
Monotheism which have had power in history,--while the same
characteristics made their poetry always lyrical, never epic or
dramatic, and their most vigorous thought a perpetual sacrifice on the
altars of the will,--this had strongly impressed us; and we seemed to
find in it a striking contrast to the characteristic genius of the Aryan
or Indo-Germanic nations, with their imaginative interpretations of the
religious sentiment, with their epic and dramatic expansions, and their
taste for breadth and variety. Somewhat warm with these notions, we came
to a meeting with our poet, and the first thought, on seeing him, was,
"The head of a Hebrew prophet!" It is not Hebrew,--Saracen rather; the
Jewish type is heavier, more material; but it corresponded strikingly to
the conceptions we had formed of the Southern Semitic crania, and the
whole make of the man was of the same character. The high cranium, so
lofty especially in the dome,--the slight and symmetrical backward slope
of the _whole_ head,--the powerful level brows, and beneath these the
dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire,--the Arabian complexion,--the
sharp-cut, intense lines of the face,--the light, tall, erect
stature,--the quick axial poise of the movement,--all these answered
with singular accuracy to the picture of those preacher-races which had
been shaping itself in our imagination. Indeed, the impression was so
strong as to induce some little feeling of embarrassment. It seemed
slightly awkward and insipid to be meeting a prophet here in a parlor
and in a spruce masquerade of modern costume