hrough the
wilderness of speculation, seeing things from the centre, working for
the reconstruction of Christian society and the readjustment of the
traditional religion. An enfranchised Puritan is a Puritan still. Of
such is Holmes, who shot his flashing arrows at all shams and
substitutes for reality, and never failed to hit the mark; of such is
Whittier,

"Whose swelling and vehement heart
Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart;"

of such is Lowell, to whom belongs the supreme distinction of having
written the greatest poem yet produced on this continent.

We who have undergone the shock of material, intellectual and spiritual
growth too often fail to recognize our debt to the deserted cause. Our
poets remind us that our very freedom is our inheritance from the system
we reject. It was inevitable that our six great poets should have been
in literature, idealists; in politics, abolitionists; in religion,
Unitarians. It was the progressive independency of a Puritan ancestry
declaring itself. Save, perhaps, in Longfellow, no gloss or glamour of
Europe obscures their poetry. No hush of servility rests on it. No
patronage summoned it, and no indifference silenced it. Our poetry is
the genuine utterance of democracy, and betrays in every syllable the
fibre of freemen.

New England poetry is well nigh as Puritan in its form as in its spirit.
There is in it a true Cromwellian temper. Our poets have been patriots,
firm and prophetic believers in their country's destiny, loving their
country so well that they dared to tell the sometimes unwelcome truth
about her. The Biblical strain is in our poetry. If our English Bible
were lost to us we could reconstruct almost all of its best verses out
of Whittier's poems. The thunders of Sinai still roll in Lowell's fiery
denunciations of smug conventionalities and wickedness in high places.
The music of the psalmist is in Longfellow's meditations, and all the
prophet's vision in Emerson's inspired utterance. The Puritan restraint
is on New England poetry. There is no noisy rhetoric, no tossing about
of big adjectives and stinging epithets, no abuse of our noble English
tongue by cheap exaggerations. Our poets do not need to underscore words
or to use heavy headlines and italics. Their invective has been mighty
because so restrained and so compressed. There is none of the common
cant or the common plausibilities. There is no passing off of
counterfeits for realities