Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of

  “The rigor of our frozen sky,”

and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists complain that it rounds no edges.  We have sometimes thought that his verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests, but should not be carried too high above-ground.  Without this, however, he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is.  In the present volume there is little of it.  It is more purely objective than any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and tree, is neighborly and homely.  He makes us see

“the old swallow-haunted barns, Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams Through which the moted sunlight streams, And winds blow freshly in to shake The red plumes of the roosted cocks And the loose hay-mow’s scented locks,”—­

  “the cattle-yard
  With the white horns tossing above the wall,”—­

the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,

  “Lighting up the swarming shad:”—­

and

  “the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
  With their silver-sided haul.”

Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home compositions and not catalogues.  There is hardly a hill, rock, stream, or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not fondly remembered.  Sometimes, we think, there is too much description, the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word.  The essential character of Mr. Whittier’s poetry is lyrical, and the rush of the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures.  Now and then there may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery, but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it.  This volume contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier’s productions in this kind.  “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” we hold to be by long odds the best of modern ballads.  There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a single exception, embodying native legends.  In “Telling the Bees,” Mr. Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite grace and feeling.  “The Garrison of Cape Ann” would have been a fine poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword.  It is pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad English and worse Latin.  With all his faults, that conceited old pedant contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble to give us a tolerably correct edition of it.  Absurdity is common enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful gift.