knowing that this new allegiance to the service of humanity was
to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a national
poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding
it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained
in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig
journalist, of the ostracism visited upon the active
Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with absolute courage
and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons and tactics.
He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields of
New England legend and history to which he was destined to return
after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the prose of
Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in the
United States was only a single and immediate phase of a
universal movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his
imagination. He wrote, at white heat, political and social verse
that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in praise of
fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns,
satires against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional
poems like "Massachusetts to Virginia," and, more nobly still,
poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image
of country and the human race."

Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his
style remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen,
then as now uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes
of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn
of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the
first general collection of his poems, and here were to be found
not merely controversial verses, but spirited "Songs of Labor,"
pictures of the lovely Merrimac countryside, legends written in