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.

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 warlike 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.