think, not quite justly treated by the critics, or
even by his latest biographer, Professor Carpenter,{62} for consenting
to the omission of the anti-slavery poems from his works, published by
Carey and Hart in Philadelphia in November, 1845. This was an
illustrated edition which had been for some time in preparation and did
not apparently, like the nearly simultaneous edition of Harper, assume
to contain his complete works. The Harper edition was published in
February, 1846, in cheaper form and double columns, and was the really
collective edition, containing the anti-slavery poems and all. As we do
not know the circumstances of the case, it cannot positively be asserted
why this variation occurred, but inasmuch as the Harpers were at that
period, and for many years after, thoroughly conservative on the slavery
question and extremely opposed to referring to it in any way, it is
pretty certain that it must have been because of the positive demand of
Longfellow that these poems were included by them. The criticism of the
abolitionists on him was undoubtedly strengthened by the apostrophe to
the Union at the close of his poem, "The Building of the Ship," in 1850,
a passage which was described by William Lloyd Garrison in the
"Liberator" as "a eulogy dripping with the blood of imbruted
humanity,"{63} and was quite as severely viewed by one of the most
zealous of the Irish abolitionists, who thus wrote to their friends in
Boston:--

DUBLIN [IRELAND], April 28, 1850.

[After speaking about Miss Weston's displeasure with Whittier and
her being unfair to him, etc., the letter adds--]

Is it not a poor thing for Longfellow that he is no
abolitionist--that his anti-slavery poetry is perfect dish water
beside Whittier's--and that he has just penned a Paean on the Union?
I can no more comprehend what there is in the Union to make the
Yankee nation adore it--than you can understand the attractions of
Royalty & Aristocracy which thousands of very good people in England
look on as the source & mainstay of all that is great and good in
the nation....

RICH D. WEBB.{64}

Yet Mr. Whittier himself, though thus contrasted with Longfellow, had
written thanking him for his "Poems on Slavery," which in tract form, he
said, "had been of important service to the Liberty movement." Whittier
had also ask