We subjoin fittingly to this chapter a characteristic letter of Mr. Whittier's, in which he speaks lovingly of Robert Burns, that other poet of freedom and independence of thought for all men.
At the Burns festival in Washington, 1869, the following letter from John G. Whittier was read:
"DEAR FRIEND,--I thank the club represented by thee for remembering me on the occasion of its annual festival. Though I have never been able to trace my ancestry to the Land o' Cakes, I have--and I know it is saying a great deal--a Scotchman's love for the poet whose fame deepens and broadens with years. The world has never known a truer singer. We may criticise his rustic verse and compare his brief and simple lyrics with the works of men of longer scrolls and loftier lyres; but after rendering to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning the homage which the intellect owes to genius, we turn to Burns, if not with awe and reverence, [yet] with a feeling of personal interest and affection. We admire others; we love him. As the day of his birth comes round, I take down his well-worn volume in grateful commemoration, and feel that I am communing with one whom living I could have loved as much for his true manhood and native nobility of soul as for those wonderful songs of his which shall sing themselves forever.
"They know little of Burns who regard him as an aimless versifier--'the idle singer of an idle lay.' Pharisees in the Church, and oppressors in the State, knew better than this. They felt those immortal sarcasms which did not die with the utterer, but lived on to work out the divine commission of Providence. In the shout of enfranchised millions, as they lift the untitled Quaker of Rochdale into the British Cabinet, I seem to hear the voice of the Ayrshire poet:--
"'For a' that and a' that, It's comin' yet for a' that; That man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for a' that.'
"With hearty sympathy and kind greetings for the Burns Club of Washington,
"I am, very truly, thy friend, "JOHN G. WHITTIER."
The title of this chapter is almost a misnomer; for the style, or technique, of the poet whose works we are considering is so very simple and unoriginal that he can hardly be said to have a distinctive style of his own,--unless a few persistent mannerisms establish a claim to it. His diction, however, is always pictorial, and glows with an intense Oriental fervor. Fused in this interior vital heat, his thoughts do not sink, like powerful Jinn, into the deep silence-sphere of the mind, to fetch thence sparkling treasures, rich and strange: rather, they run to and fro with lightning swiftness amid the million surface-pictures of the intellect; rearranging, recombining, and creatively blending its images, and finally pouring them out along the page to charm our fancy and feeling with old thoughts and scenes painted in fresh colors and from new points of view. There is more of fancy than of creative imagination in Whittier.