“Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board, Answering Charles’s royal mandate with a stern ‘Thus saith the Lord,’”

and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than with Mary Dyer.  Indeed,

“Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o’er their brow, Answering Charles’s royal mandate with a thee instead of thou,”

would hardly do.  Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit that he smacks of the soil.  It is a New England heart he buttons his strait-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now and then.  Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.  He makes abroad rhyme with God, law with war, us with curse, scorner with honor, been with men, beard with shared.  For the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest we can make no terms whatever,—­they must march out with no honors of war.  The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give a flavor of essence-pennyr’y’l to the very Beatitudes.  It differs from Lowland Scotch as a patois from a dialect.

But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other and better claims on us than as a stylist.  There is true fire in the heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet.  A more juicy soil might have made him a Burns or a Beranger for us.  New England is dry and hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the magnolia grows after a fashion.  It is all very nice to say to our poets, “You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women,—­in short, the entire outfit of Shakspeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere”; and when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of approval.  But it is all bosh, nevertheless.  Nature is not the same here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition.  Nature without an ideal background is nothing.  We may claim whatever merits we like, (and our orators are not too bashful,) we may be as free and enlightened as we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque.  We may be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little of that marvellous Bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding.  The Puritans left us a fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they disinherited us of the past.  Not a single stage-property of poetry did they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous attributes, and even he could not stand the climate.  Neither horn nor hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century.  He is as dead as the goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.