the auctioneer, "Going! going!"--it is the sobbing of the slave on the
auction-block! And _this_, too, O Poet, this, too, is America! So you
are not secure of your grand believing imaginations yet, but must fight
for them. The faith of your heart would perish, if it did not put on
armor.

Whittier's poetic life has three principal epochs. The first opens and
closes with the "Voices of Freedom." We may use Darwin's phrase, and
call it the period of Struggle for Life. His ideal itself is endangered;
the atmosphere he would inhale is filled with poison; a desolating moral
prosaicism springs up to justify a great social ugliness, and spreads in
the air where his young hopes would try their wings; and in the
imperfect strength of youth he has so much of dependence upon actual
surroundings, that he must either war with their evil or succumb to it.
Of surrender his daring and unselfish soul never for a moment thought.
Never did a trained falcon stoop upon her quarry with more fearlessness,
or a spirit of less question, than that which bore our young hero to the
moral fray; yet the choice was such as we have indicated.

The faith for which he fought is uttered with spirit in a stanza from
"The Branded Hand."

"In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below,
Thou didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know:
God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can,
That the one, sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is Man."

Our poet, too, conversing with God's stars and silence, has come to an
understanding with himself, and made up his mind. That Man's being has
an ideal or infinite value, and that all consecrated institutions are
shams, and their formal consecration a blasphemous mockery, save as they
look to that fact,--this in his Merrimac solitudes has come forth
clearly to his soul, and, like old Hebrew David, he has said, "My heart
is fixed." Make other selections who will, he has concluded to face life
and death on this basis.

Did he not choose as a poet MUST? Between a low moral
prosaicism and a generous moral ideal was it possible for him to
hesitate? Are there those whose real thought is, that man, beyond his
estimation as an animal, represents only a civil value,--that he is but
the tailor's "dummy" and clothes-horse of institutions? Do they tell our
poet that his notion of man as a divine revelation, as a pure spiritual
or absolute value, is a mere dr