who has stood alone with his
unclothed soul, and out of that nakedness before the Eternities said,
"_I trust_,"--he is victorious; he has entered the modern epoch, and has
not lost the spiritual crown from his brows.

The central poem of this epoch is "Questions of Life."

"I am: how little more I know!
Whence came I? Whither do I go?
A centred self, which feels and is;
_A cry between the silences;_
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife
With sunshine on the hills of life;
A shaft from Nature's quiver cast
Into the Future from the Past;
Between the cradle and the shroud
A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud."

Then to outward Nature, to mythic tradition, to the thought, faith,
sanctity of old time he goes in quest of certitude, but returns to God
in the heart, and to the simple heroic act by which he that believes
BELIEVES.

"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,
I come, an over-wearied child,
In cool and shade His peace to find,
Like dew-fall settling on the mind.
Assured that all I know is best,
And humbly trusting for the rest,
I turn....
From Nature and her mockery, Art,
And book and speech of men apart,
To the still witness in my heart;
With reverence waiting to behold
His Avatar of love unfold,
The Eternal Beauty new and old!"

"The Panorama and other Poems," together with "Later Poems,"[13] having
the dates of 1856 and 1857, constitute the transition to his third and
consummate epoch. Much in them deserves notice, but we must hasten. And
yet, instead of hastening, we will pause, and take this opportunity to
pick a small critical quarrel with Mr. Whittier. We charge him, in the
first place, with sundry felonious assaults upon the good letter _r_. In
the "Panorama," for example, we find _law_ rhyming with _for_! You, Mr.
Poet, you, who indulge fastidious objections to the whipping of women,
to outrage that innocent preposition thus! And to select the word _law_
itself, with which to force it into this lawless connection! Secondly,
_romance_ and _allies_ are constantly written by him with the accent on
the first syllable. These be heinous offences! A poet, of all men,
should cherish the liquid consonants, and should resist the tendency of
the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we
might complain that he sometimes--rarely--writes, not by vocation of the
ancient Muses, who were daughters