THE shadows round the inland sea 1848. Lake of the Hills! where, cool and sweet, Thy sunset waters lie! i Along the sky, in wavy lines, O'er isle and reach and bay, Green-belted with eternal pines, The mountains stretch away. Below, the maple masses sleep Where shore with water blends, While midway on the tranquil deep The evening light descends. So seemed it when yon hill's red crown,2 Of old, the Indian trod, And, through the sunset air, looked down To him of light and shade the laws 10 20 1 The 'Lake of the Hills' is Lake Winnipesaukee. One of Whittier's favorite resorts was West Ossipee, at the foot of the Ossipee Mountains, just northeast of the lake. See Pickard's Whittier-Land, pp. 109-115; his Life of Whittier, vol. ii, p. 669; and Whittier's 'Among the Hills' and 'Summer by the Lakeside.' 2 Mt. Chocorua, north of West Ossipee, the most picturesque, though by no means the highest, of the mountains of New England. Its cone is formed of a peculiar reddish stone known as Chocorua granite.' For the legend of the Indian chief from whom it was named, see Thomas Starr King's The White Hills, or Sweetser's White Mountains, p. 341. See also Whittier's How They Climbed Chocorua' in Whittier-Land, pp. 111-114. One of Longfellow's early poems, 'Jeckoyva,' had the Indian chief Chocorua for its hero. 3 The name Winnipesaukee is popularly thought to mean The Smile of the Great Spirit.' Students of the Indian languages, however, agree that its real meaning is 'Beautiful Water in a High Place.' THE South-land boasts its teeming cane, Rough, bleak, and hard, our little State From Autumn frost to April rain, Yet, on her rocks, and on her sands, The riches of the Commonwealth For well she keeps her ancient stock, The stubborn strength of Pilgrim Rock; And still maintains, with milder laws, And clearer light, the Good Old Cause ! 1 Originally called 'Dedication of a School-house.' Revile him not, the Tempter hath 1 This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the Seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the 'Compromise,' and the Fugitive Slave Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary my admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the great senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my pro test. But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in The Lost Occasion,' I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of Liberty and Union, one and inseparable.' (WHITTIER.) Ichabod and 'The Lost Occasion' (p. 348) should necessarily be read together. The best possible comment on the two poems, from the point of view of to-day, is that of Professor Carpenter: Those whom Whittier knew best in later life relate that he came eventually to feel that Webster was perhaps right and he wrong; that compromise meant weary years of waiting, but that the further and consistent pursuit of such a policy might have successfully avoided the evils of war and of reconstruction. However that may be, the verses [of Ichabod '] are, in their awful scorn, the most powerful that he ever wrote. Right or wrong, he spoke for a great part of the North and West, nay, for the world. For the poem, in much the same fashion as Browning's Lost Leader,' is becoming disassociated with any special name, and may thus remain a most remarkable expression-the most terrible in our literature of the aversion which any mass of people may feel, especially in a democracy, for the once-worshipped leader whose acts and words, in matters of the greatest public weal, seem to retrograde.' (Carpenter's Whittier, pp. 221-222.) Compare Emerson's Webster,' p. 61, and the note on it; and Holmes's 'The Statesman's Secret,' and 'The Birthday of Daniel Webster.' See also Pickard's Life of Whittier, vol. i, pp. 327-328. For the meaning of the title, see 1 Samuel iv, 19-22: 'And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel.' It may have been suggested by an anonymous article of Lowell's on Daniel Webster, in the Anti-Slavery Standard (June, 1846), in which he says: 'Shall not the Recording Angel write Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom?' (Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, p. 201.) On south-sloping brooksides should smile in the light, O'er the cold winter-beds of their latewaking roots The frosty flake eddies, the ice-crystal shoots; And, longing for light, under wind-driven heaps, Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps, 10 Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers, With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers! We wait for thy coming, sweet wind of the south! For the touch of thy light wings, the kiss of thy mouth; For the yearly evangel thou bearest from God, Resurrection and life to the graves of the sod! Up our long river-valley, for days, have not ceased The wail and the shriek of the bitter northeast, Raw and chill, as if winnowed through ices and snow, All the way from the land of the wild Es quimau, 20 Until all our dreams of the land of the Who serves to-day upon the list The weak is strong to-day; And sleekest broadcloth counts no more To-day let pomp and vain pretence I set a plain man's common sense ΤΟ 20 |