, shaking hands, and saying,
"Happy to meet you," after the fashion of our feeble civilities.

All this came vividly to remembrance, on taking up, the other day,
Whittier's last book of poems, "In War-Time,"--a volume that has been
welcomed all over the land with enthusiastic delight. Had it been no
more, however, than a mere private reminiscence, it should, at present,
have remained private. But have we not here a key to Whittier's genius?
Is not this Semitic centrality and simplicity, this prophetic depth,
reality, and vigor, without great lateral and intellectual range, its
especial characteristic? He has not the liberated, light-winged Greek
imagination,--imagination not involved and included in the religious
sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpretation
between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean,
imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all
forms of character and life, which culminated in Shakspeare; but that
imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what
we may call _ideal force of heart_, this he has eminently; and it is
this central, invisible, Semitic heat which makes him a poet.

Imagination exists in him, not as a separable faculty, but as a pure
vital suffusion. Hence he is an _inevitable_ poet. There is no drop of
his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic
expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence
did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is,
indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligible and acceptable
to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and
imagination. Whoever has common sense and a sound heart has the powers
by which he may be appreciated. And yet he is not only a real poet, but
he is _all_ poet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was
baptized by immersion. His notes are not many; but in them Nature
herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps, on a bush,
not a lark that floods with orient hilarity the skies of morning; but
the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is
part of the divine flame.

This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is
Hebrew, Biblical,--more so than that of any other poet now using the
English language. In other words, he is organically a poem of the Will.
He is a flower of the moral sentiment