Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier

“ [163] spirit” (1864), has twenty-two from Whittier; the “Unitarian hymn and tune book” of 1868, has seven, and Dr. Martineau's “Hymns of praise” has seven. As has elsewhere been stated, Mr.Mead and Mrs. Edwin D. Mead reported, after attending many popular meetings in England, in 1901, that they heard Whittier and Longfellow quoted and sung more freely than any other poets.

It is especially to be noticed that in Whittier's poems of the sea there is a salt breath, a vigorous companionship-perhaps because he was born and bred near it — not to be found in either of his companion authors. There is doubtless a dramatic movement, an onward sweep in Longfellow's “Wreck of the Hesperus” and “Sir Humphrey Gilbert” such as Whittier never quite attained, and the same may be true of the quiet, emotional touch in Longfellow's “The fire of Driftwood” ; nor was there ever produced in America, perhaps, any merely meditative poem of the sea so thoughtful and so perfect in execution as Holmes's “The Chambered Nautilus.” Among American poets less known, Brownlee Brown's “Thalatta” and Helen Jackson's “Spoken” were respectively beyond him in their different directions. But for the daily atmosphere and life, not so much of the sea as of the seaside, for the companionship of the sailor, the touch that makes the ocean like a larger and more sympathetic human being to those who dwell within its very sound, Whittier stands before them all; he is simply a companion to the sailor, as he is to the farmer and the hunter; and he weaves out of the life of each a poetry such as its actual child hardly knows. The “Tent on the beach” will always keep