The church bell from the neighboring town
Proclaimed the welcome hour of noon.
The Potter heard, and stopped his wheel,
His apron on the grass threw down,
Whistled his quiet little tune

Not overloud nor overlong,

And ended thus his simple song:

32. Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon,
The noon will be the afternoon,

Too soon to-day be yesterday:

Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the Past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay!

LITERARY ANALYSIS.—412-418. Stop... clay! Point out examples of iteration.-Point out a metaphor.-As a closing study the stanzas embodying the song of the Potter may be read by themselves consecutively.

405

410

415

John &Whittin

CHARACTERIZATION BY DAVID WASSON.

1. Whittier has not the liberated, light-winged, Greek imagination-imagination not involved and included in the religious sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpreta

tion between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean, imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all forms of character and life which culminated in Shakespeare; but that imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what we may call ideal force of heart. This he has eminently; and it is this central, invisible, Semitic heat which makes him a poet.

2. Imagination exists in him not as a separable faculty, but as a pure, vital suffusion. Hence he is an inevitable poet. There is no drop of his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is, indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligibly susceptible to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and imagination. Whoever has common-sense and a sound heart has the powers by which he may be appreciated. And yet he is not only a real poet, but he is all poet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was baptized by immersion. His notes are not many, but in them Nature herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps on a bush, not a lark that floods with orient hilarity the skies of morning; but the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is part of the divine flame.

3. This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is Hebrew Biblical-more so than that of any other poet now using the English language. In other words, he is organically a poem of the Will. He is a flower of the moral sentiment, and of the moral sentiment not in its flexible, feminine, vine-like dependence and play, but in its masculine rigor, climbing in direct, vertical affirmation, like a forest pine. In this respect he affiliates with Wordsworth and, going farther back, with Milton, whose tap-root was Hebrew, though in the vast epic flowering of his genius he passed beyond the imaginative range of the Semitic mind.

4. In thus identifying our bard, spiritually, with a broad form of the genius of mankind, we already say with emphasis that his is indeed a Life. Yes, once more, a real Life. He is a nature. He was born, not manufactured. Here, once again, the old, mysterious, miraculous processes of spiritual assimilation. Here a

genuine root-clutch upon the elements of man's experience, and an inevitable, indomitable working-up of them into human shape. To look at him without discerning this vital depth and reality were as good as no looking at all.

5. Moreover, the man and the poet are one and the same. His verse is no literary Beau-Brummelism, but a re-presentation of that which is presented in his consciousness. First there is inward, vital conversion of the elements of his experience, then verse, or version-first the soul, then the body. His voice, as such, has little range, nor is it any marvel of organic perfection; on the contrary, there is many a voice with nothing at all in it which far surpasses his in mere vocal excellence. Only in this you can hear the deep refrain of Nature, and of Nature chanting her moral ideal.

I.-PROEM.

1. I love the old melodious lays
Which softly melt the ages through,

The songs of Spenser's golden days,
Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase,

Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew.

5

NOTES.

Line 3. Spenser, Edmund (1553-1598), one of the most illustrious of English poets, and author of the Faerie Queene. 4. Arcadian Sidney's, etc. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), one of the

most brilliant courtiers and writers of Queen Elizabeth's age. His principal work is The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: hence the force of "Arcadian" above.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-I. What word in the first line belongs to the diction

of poetry?

66

2. Which softly melt, etc.

3. Spenser's golden days.

'golden" as here used?

4. Sidney's silvery phrase.

What is the figure of speech?

Whence arises the applicability of the epithet

Express this in your own words.

5. What is meant by "our noon of time?"-What is the figure of speech in this line?

2. Yet, vainly in my quiet hours
To breathe their marvellous notes I try;

I feel them, as the leaves and flowers

In silence feel the dewy showers,

And drink with glad, still lips the blessing of the sky.

3. The rigor of a frozen clime,

The harshness of an untaught ear,

The jarring words of one whose rhyme

Beat often Labor's hurried time,

10

Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife, are here. 15

4. Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, No rounded art the lack supplies;

Unskilled the subtle lines to trace,

Or softer shades of Nature's face,

1 view her common forms with unanointed eyes.

5. Nor mine the seer-like power to show The secrets of the heart and mind;

To drop the plummet-line below

Our common world of joy and woe,

A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.

20

25

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-6, 7. Yet... try. Transpose into the prose order. 8-10. I feel... sky. What is the figure of speech?-What is the subject of "drink?"-By what expressive paraphrasis does the poet denote "the dewy showers?"

II. The rigor... clime. State what theory of climatic influence you suppose to be in the author's mind.

14. Beat... time. Explain the figure of speech.

16, 17. Of... supplies. What kind of sentence rhetorically?-Transpose into the direct order.-What is meant by "rounded art?"

20. I. What are the adjuncts to this pronoun?-Explain the allusion in the expression "unanointed eyes."

23. To drop the plummet-line, etc. the thought in plain language.

What is the figure of speech?-Express