JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

1807-1892

Unlike Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, who fell heirs to the culture and learning of generations of scholarship, John Greenleaf Whittier began life with few intellectual advantages. Born on a farm near Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1807, his boyhood was passed in toil unrelieved by any opportunities for mental development. A copy of Burns's poems which chanced to fall into his hands gave the Quaker farm-boy the first inspiration to write poetry himself. For a few weeks each winter he was permitted to attend the district school, until William Lloyd Garrison, who had published some of his boyish verses, persuaded his parents to send him to Haverhill Academy. Two terms at this institution completed his education at school, nor was he privileged in after life to visit Europe, an experience which to many of his contemporaries had been the rich equivalent of a university course.

At the age of twenty Whittier left the farm to take up journalism as his profession. For twelve years, from 1828 to 1840, he was an editor of daily journals in various towns, at Haverhill, at Hartford, then at Boston, and at Philadelphia. During this period he became more and more identified with the abolition movement, and published numerous stirring poems on this subject. His anti-slavery verses, however, have proved to be the least enduring of his writings. In 1831 he published his first book, a miscellany of prose and verse called "Legends of New England." In 1840, the farm in Haverhill having been sold, Whittier purchased a house in Amesbury, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Much of his time was spent in anti-slavery agitation, speaking fearlessly, writing passionately, and attending many conventions. He also edited the "National Era," and was one of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly." Aside from his anti-slavery poems Whittier published "Lays of my Home in 1843, "Songs of Labor in 1850, and "Home Ballads" in 1860. These books contain some of the finest lyrics and most stirring ballads in American literature, including as they do Angels of Buena Vista," Maud Muller," "Ichabod," Barefoot Boy," and Skipper Ireson's Ride." In 1863 "In War Time" appeared, containing among other poems "Barbara Freitchie." Three years later Whittier published Snow-Bound," and achieved his first great popular success. The sales of this book placed him for the first time, at the age of fifty-nine, in comfortable circumstances. "The Tent on the Beach and "Among the Hills," published in quick succession, were received with almost equal favor, but Snow-Bound" was, and still remains, Whittier's greatest work, an idyll of New England life comparable, in regard to literary worth and popularity, to Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and Burns's Cottar's Saturday Night." During his later years Whittier published several volumes of poetry which, while they increased his popularity, added nothing to his fame. He died in 1892, perhaps the most popular of American poets after Longfellow.

66

66

It is as a poet that Whittier will be longest and best remembered, but he is also the author of much charming prose. Besides a number of tales and sketches from his pen, concerned chiefly with New England scenes and legends, we have various literary criticisms and reviews, such as his article on John Bunyan," which show that the poet possessed skill of no mean order as an essayist. His prose style, as we are led to expect from his personal character, is simple, unaffected, and direct.

WH

JOHN BUNYAN

"Wouldst see

A man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?"

"HO has not read " Pilgrim's Progress"? Who has not, in childhood, followed the wandering Christian on his way to the Celestial City? Who has not laid at night his young head on the pillow, to paint on the walls of darkness pictures of the Wicket Gate and the Archers, the Hill of Difficulty, the Lions and Giants, Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair, the sunny Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds, the Black River and the wonderful glory beyond it; and at last fallen asleep, to dream over the strange story, to hear the sweet welcomings of the sisters at the House Beautiful, and the song of birds from the window of that " upper chamber which opened towards the sunrising?" And who, looking back to the green spots in his childish experiences, does not bless the good tinker of Elstow?

And who, that has reperused the story of the pilgrim at a maturer age, and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or grateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of taste and feeling, who does not, with Cowper,

"Even in transitory life's late day,

Revere the man whose pilgrim marks the road,
And guides the progress of the soul to God"?

We have just been reading, with no slight degree of interest, that simple but wonderful piece of autobiography, entitled "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," from the pen of the author of "Pilgrim's Progress." It is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal pilgrim; "truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air

of hope and faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entire unveiling of a human heart; the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of its sin. The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not so much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the last solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the spectre of sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to selfgratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of his inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to give glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him, like his own pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Castle, and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and pleasant, and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and the Shining Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. In the introductory pages he says: "I could have dipped into a style higher than this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was."

This book, as well as "Pilgrim's Progress," was written in Bedford prison, and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his "children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his ministry." In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken from them, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards, would look after them with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are tempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think God fights you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it was so with your father. But out of all the Lord delivered me."

He gives no dates; he affords scarcely a clew to his localities; of the man, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors and contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we have only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is the story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and place to do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell and the splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed, from his record, that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament, in his young years, among the praying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts whom he has immortalized in his allegory; but the only allusion which he makes to this portion of his experience is by way of illustration of the goodness of God in preserving him on occasions of peril.

He was born in Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his own words, "his father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and most despised of all the families of the land." His father was a tinker, and his son followed the same calling, which necessarily brought him into association with the lowest and most depraved classes of English society. The estimation in which the tinker and his occupation were held, in the seventeenth century, may be learned from the quaint and humorous description of Sir Thomas Overbury. "The tinker," saith he, "is a movable, for he has no abiding in one place; he seems to be devout, for his life is a continual pilgrimage, and sometimes, in humility, goes barefoot, therein making necessity a virtue; he is a gallant, for he carries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for he bears all his substance with him. He is always furnished with a song, to which his hammer, keeping tune, proves that he was the first founder of the kettle-drum; where the best ale is, there stands his music most upon crotchets. The companion of his travel is some foul, sun-burnt quean, that, since the terrible statute, has recanted gipsyism, and is turned pedlaress. So marches he all over England, with his bag and baggage; his conversation is irreprovable, for he is always mending. He observes truly the statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg. He is so strong an enemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make three than want work;

and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his faults behind him. His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting, proves him a linguist. He is entertained in every place, yet enters no farther than the door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape Tyburn and Banbury, he dies a beggar."

Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of John Bunyan. As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearing boy, as his father doubtless was before him. "It was my delight," says he, " to be taken captive by the devil. I had few equals, both for cursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming." Yet, in his ignorance and darkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the reproaches of conscience. He was scared, even in childhood, with dreams of hell and apparitions of devils. Troubled with fears of eternal fire, and the malignant demons who fed it in the regions of despair, he says that he often wished either that there was no hell, or that he had been born a devil himself, that he might be a tormentor rather than one of the tormented.

At an early age he appears to have married. His wife was as poor as himself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoon between them; but she brought with her two books on religious subjects, the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of influence on his mind. He went to church regularly, adored the priest and all things pertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun with superstition." On one occasion a sermon was preached against the breach of the Sabbath by sports or labor, which struck him at the moment as especially designed for himself; but by the time he had finished his dinner, he was prepared to "shake it out of his mind, and return to his sports and gaming."

66

"But the same day," he continues, as I was in the midst of a game of 'cat,' and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it a second time, a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' At this, I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my 'cat' upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven, and it was, as if I had, with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus look down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if he did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices.