olden time. Then comes the "New Home" on the sea-shore, where, instead of mountain and waterfalls, the bride saw

"A wild and broken landscape, spiked with firs;"

yet her woman's heart was content with the cold love of her stern warrior husband, and her affection throve still,

"As o'er some granite wall,

Soft ivy leaves open to the morning dew

And warm bright sun, the love of that young wife

Found on a hard, cold breast the dew and warmth of life."

But when spring came the bashaba, who had pined the winter through, sent for his daughter to visit his wigwam. Winneparkit sent her with a brave escort, but was too proud to go for her when Passaconnaway sent to tell him the visit was done. So she remained, joyless, among the summer flowers and autumn fruits of her childhood-home. All this is told in a song, "At Pennacook." During the winter, too, she sighed for her new home; and when spring snows were melting, and spring floods were plowing the mountains, her heart can no longer restrain her purpose, and she takes her "Departure," in her frail canoe, down the freshet-swollen Merrimack. The canoe is found whirling idly in an eddy, and the Indian women sing their sad "Lament:"

"We shall hear thee or see thee no more!"

Such is the brief and imperfect outline of a very sweet story of that olden time which we would gladly remember more of, but which is fast fading from the sight of history. May it never fade from the imagination of poesy! Had Whittier written more on such topics, and introduced a greater variety of incidents, as he undoubtedly has power to do, he might have been more widely beloved as a poet; but he could hardly have been so influential as a teacher of truth or so highly valued as a friend and helper of humanity.

"Mogg Megone" is a poem written, says the author, "in early life; and its subject is not such as he would have chosen at any subsequent period." The design is simply to describe early NewEngland scenery and incidents. While, therefore, the story is of no account, the descriptions are very fine, and painted with the enthusiasm of an artist. With such a purpose in view, the incidents may be very common, and even indifferent, and the whole structure may be as rude as the wigwam of the Indian described. All a lover of good poetry will ask is, that the pictures hung up in it shall be such

as would be prized anywhere, in a temple or in a church. To be sure, men do not build a cabin to hang pictures in, and this is probably why the author is disposed to undervalue this tale. It is, however, to be judged not as a whole thing, but as a series of descriptive poems, connected by the accident of having reference to a particular locality; and the poem should be held sacred as long as it holds some of the most lovely paintings of New-England scenery. There is no plot or art about the thing, for it is the old tale of maiden innocence and unsophisticated trustfulness, of womanly, self-forgetting passion, betrayed and deserted, turned to gall and wormwood, and bursting out into demoniac desire for revenge. An Indian chief, Mogg Megone, is hired to destroy the seducer. When the deed is accomplished and the scalp is laid at her feet, all the maiden's love returns, and in revenge, she, with her own hand, kills the chief, who was intimately connected with the plots of the French for the extirpation of the English settlers from that coast. Ruth Bonython then becomes mad, and wanders forth in the forests alone; and finally, after confessing her crimes to a priest, and being spurned by him on account of his disappointed hopes, she dies beneath a maple, on the banks of a stream, just when the trees are putting forth leaves, and the birds are building nests and filling the grove with their melody. The various characters that figure in the story are not numerous. Ruth and her father, an outlawed Englishman, Mogg Megone, the Catholic priest, and Boomazeen, another Indian chief, if indeed a company of soldiers, who are described rather than introduced, be excepted, are all whom we see or hear. Almost any other story would have answered the same purpose as this, though few would have suited so well to the wild, wierd scenery to be described; rough and rugged rocks, fretted by foaming streams and overhung by somber pines and wierd spruce, are well adapted to the unnatural passions bred by the outlaw in the bosom of his companionless daughter, and to the fierce conflicts of rival settlers with the untamed natives. And then the versification is in varied measure, now sweeping in a galloping pace through long lines of anapestics, and then tripping in nimble trochees; weaving rhymes in all possible patterns, and tying the whole into one brilliant piece of antique tapestry, making light and beautiful pictures of scenery on the dark and gloomy ground of the melancholy tale. Hear the song of forest worship, and see this picture, while the Indian chief, still bloody with the murder of the betrayer of innocence, and the outlawed Bonython, even now plotting the death of that Indian and the plunder of his lands, are together seeking the girl whom the father has promised to that chief as his bride:

"Quickly glancing to and fro,
Listening to each sound, they go
Round the column of the pine,
Indistinct in shadow seeming,
Like some old and pillar'd shrine;
With the soft and white moonshine,
Round the foliage-tracery shed,
Of each column's branching head,
For its lamps of worship gleaming!
And the sounds awaken'd there,
In the pine leaves, fine and small,
Soft and sweetly musical,

By the fingers of the air,
For the anthem's dying fall
Lingering round some temple's wall!
Niche and cornice round and round
Wailing like the ghost of sound!
Is not nature's worship thus
Ceaseless ever, going on?

Hath it not a voice for us
In the thunder, or the tone
Of the leaf-harp faint and small,
Speaking to the unseal'd ear

Words of blended love and fear,

Of the mighty soul of all ?"—Vol. i, p. 35.

The first part, in which lies the chief part of the dramatic action and incident, closes with the death of the chief. The second part opens with a gorgeous scene of Indian Summer, on the coasts of Maine, with her thousand islands reflected in the restless waves of ocean. The maiden meets the priest in a rude wilderness chapel, and makes her confession and asks absolution, which the priest, hearing the name of the murdered chieftain, denies; and she wanders again in sadness and loneliness, bearing her own burden, which no hand but one can lift. The third and last part tells how Norridgewock was taken in battle by the English, and plundered; and how the girl wandered, and at last was found by a band of soldiers, sleeping beneath the maple that long calm sleep that knows no waking.

Following Mogg Megone is the division called "Legendary," consisting of short poems, mostly relating to Indian legends and Quaker traditions. And these are just such poems as a descendant of the Newbury witches, bred up a farmer boy, ought to write when grown to be a man, among the posterity of the old Salem Quakers; and they will thrill many a heart that burns with the hate of oppression. Cassandra Southwick is just such another hymn in spirit as the Hebrew children might have sung after their deliverance from the fire; and is such as the persecuted of all ages have delighted in when their foes have been baffled and overthrown by the might of the Lord. "The Fountain" is clear as crystal itself, and grateful as

the living waters that flow from the springs of Helicon. It would be almost a sacrilege to break it for quotation.

The second volume opens with the "Songs of Labor," six in number, introduced with a very appropriate dedication, in which the poet makes excuse for these humble lays, as he is pleased to call them. Beauty, he says, is its own excuse; but the weed must show a healing virtue, and the ore a usc, if they would be honored.

"So haply these, my simple lays

Of homely toil, may serve to show
The orchard bloom and tassel'd maize
That skirt and gladden duty's way,

The unsung beauty hid life's common things below!"

Vol. ii, Dedication.

Very spiritedly are these verses sung.

But

they reveal what They are too long

cannot always be denied to be a fault of Whittier. for songs, and too short for tales or essays. A song must be very short, or it cannot be remembered and sung with spirit and vigor. It must be apt for quotation, and full of common feelings and sentiment. It will not do to fill it with learning, or to drape it in a robe of figurative language, not, at the same time, the language of everyday life. The length of these Songs of Labor might very appropriately have given to them the name of Ballads, and under that title they would have been more rightly ranged. "The Shipbuilders," however, is a noble ode, and deserves a much more extended reputation and use than it has. And "The Huskers" is a beautiful New-England pastoral. It is really too beautiful for the place in which it stands. Read it, and see how an autumn day and its farm labor can be described. In its simple, sweet old English, there is such a picture of a whole day, morning, noon, and evening, as scarcely another book can show. And the song which

"The master of the village school, sleek of hair and smooth of tongue, To the quaint tune of some old psalm, a husking ballad sung,"

is a glorious anthem of exultation and praise. It is devoutly to be wished that the youth of the nation might learn this by heart and prize it as it deserves. It would do more for making frugal, honest, industrious, fearless men than half the colleges in the land without it.

In this second volume are two other poems of more length and pretensions, "The Chapel of the Hermits" and "The Panorama." The first of these is designed as a plea of holy charity for those who differ from us in opinion and in practice, and as a lesson of faith FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-6

or confidence in the final triumph of right and truth; and it is in spirit as sweet as the voice of an angel, and as soothing as the love of a scraph. It has many fine passages of power, but the quotations have already been too much multiplied. The second is a contrast, bold, striking, and truthful, between "a land of the free and a home of the brave," and a country cursed with the crime, the weakness, and the cowardice of the slave. It is the one topic on which Whittier becomes inspired with fierceness and anger; and it would be very unjust to say that he does not well to be angry. For" in all his madness" on this subject, "there is a method" and a power of earnest truthfulness that make the verse carry the hearts of men on the boiling tide of its song.

Here, also, are several "Ballads," a form of poetry as natural to the English soil and language as was the pastoral to the Greek of old. The bare mention of these, at this distance from our starting point, must suffice. Two of them relate to the olden days of Indian warfare, and contain the record of the patient waiting and longing remembrance of those who are far away in the forest, either stolen or engaged in the perilous warfare, and very sweetly do they sing these ideas. One, Maud Muller, is only the rehearsal of a common wayside meeting that may occur any day, but which stamps its impress on hearts that ever after remember and sigh "those saddest of words, 'It might have been!" But the most touching, the simplest, and the one most in the spirit and manner of the old English ballads, is "Kathleen," which relates the mournful tale of a sweet Irish maid, sold by a cruel mother-in-law to be a servant. She was bought by a "goodman" of Boston, and so winning was she in her ways that she was adopted in place of a daughter who had gone to heaven. But the page of the maid's father, the Lord of Galway, wandered east and west till he found her at last, and restored her to her father and home, and possessed both the maid and the home as a fitting reward. This ballad will by many be called the sweetest thing in all the collection, and the power to read it without tears is by no means a gift to be coveted.

But scattered along both volumes are many miscellaneous poems. any one of several of which would have made a great reputation for an ordinary man, or for one less busily engrossed in the moil and strife of the great moral warfare of the age; and these pieces are those for which he will be most widely praised and longest remembered. They have all the fire of the Voices of Freedom, without their bristling epithets and withering scorn; all the tenderness of the Chapel of Hermits, without its suspicion of heresy; all the love for nature and sympathy for her whims of the story of