But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing the homely life of the New England country-side.  His rural ballads and idyls are as genuinely American as any thing that our poets have written, and have been recommended, as such, to English working-men by Whittier’s co-religionist, John Bright.  The most popular of these is probably Maud Muller, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. Skipper Ireson’s Ride is also very current.  Better than either of them, as poetry, is Telling the Bees.  But Whittier’s masterpiece in work of a descriptive and reminiscent kind is Snow-Bound, 1866, a New England fireside idyl which in its truthfulness recalls the Winter Evening of Cowper’s Task and Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night, but in sweetness and animation is superior to either of them.  Although in some things a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is also a Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been upon the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Massachusetts.  The most impressive of these is Cassandra Southwick.  The latest of them, the King’s Missive, originally contributed to the Memorial History of Boston in 1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy.  The Bridal of Pennacook, 1848, and the Tent on the Beach, 1867, which contain some of his best work, were series of ballads told by different narrators, after the fashion of Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn.  As an artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate or rich.  He uses only a few metrical forms—­by preference the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet—­

  “Maud Muller on a summer’s day
  Raked the meadow sweet with hay,” etc.

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monotonous, as do some of Whittier’s mannerisms, which proceed, however, never from affectation, but from a lack of study and variety, and so, no doubt, in part from the want of that academic culture and thorough technical equipment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed.  Though his poems are not in dialect, like Lowell’s Biglow Papers, he knows how to make an artistic use of homely provincial words, such as “chore,” which give his idyls of the hearth and the barnyard a genuine Doric cast.  Whittier’s prose is inferior to his verse.  The fluency which was a besetting sin of his poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme and meter, ran into wordiness.  His prose writings were partly contributions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches of English and American reformers, and partly studies of the scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valley.  Those of most literary interest were the Supernaturalism of New England, 1847, and some of the papers in Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854.