This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier’s powers.  We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood.  He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian.  The half-mystic tone of “The Shadow and the Light” contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the war-like clang of “From Perugia.”  The years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the rile has quietly settled.  We have had no more purely American poet than Mr. Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous expression.  The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been so true to the present.

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