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 Shakespeare; 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.

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,—­