must plead,
And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.

"So haply these my simple lays
Of homely toil may serve to show
The orchard-bloom and tasselled maize
That skirt and gladden duty's ways,
The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."

Not pure gold as yet, but genuine silver. The aim at a definite use is
still apparent, as he himself perceives; but there is nevertheless a
constant native play into them of ideal feeling. It is no longer a
struggle for room to draw poetic breath in, but only the absence of a
perfectly free and unconscious poetic respiration. Yet they are sterling
poems, with the stamp of the mint upon them. And some of the strains are
such as no living man but Whittier has proven his power to produce.
"Ichabod," for example, is the purest and profoundest _moral_ lament, to
the best of our knowledge, in modern literature, whether American or
European. It is the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain
on the battle-fields of heaven.

Two years later comes the "Chapel of the Hermits," and with it the
second epoch in Whittier's poetic career. The epoch of Culture we name
it. The poet has now passed the period of outward warfare. All the
arrows in the quiver of his noble wrath are spent. Now on the wrong and
shame of the land he looks down with deep, calm, superior eyes,
sorrowful, indeed, and reproving, but no longer perturbed. His hot,
eloquent, prophetic spirit now breathes freely, lurk in the winds of the
moment what poison may; for he has attained to those finer airs of
eternity which hide ever, like the luminiferous ether, in this
atmosphere of time; so that, like the scholar-hero of Schiller, he is
indeed "in the time, but not of it." Still his chant of high
encouragement shall fly forth on wings of music to foster the nobilities
of the land; still over the graves of the faithful dead he shall murmur
a requiem, whose chastened depth and truth relate it to other and better
worlds than this; still his lips utter brave rebuke, but it is a rebuke
that falls, like the song of an unseen bird, out of the sky, so purely
moral, so remote from earthly and egoistic passion, so sure and
reposeful, that verse is its natural embodiment. The home-elements of
his intellectual and moral life he has fairly assimilated; and his verse
in its mellowness and rhythmical excellence reflects this achievement of
his spirit.

But now, after the warfare, b