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‘ [167] blood of imbruted humanity,’1 and was quite as severely viewed by one of the most zealous of the Irish abolitionists, who thus wrote to their friends in Boston:—

Dublin [Ireland], April 28, 1850.
[After speaking about Miss Weston's displeasure with Whittier and her being unfair to him, etc., the letter adds—] Is it not a poor thing for Longfellow that he is no abolitionist— that his anti-slavery poetry is perfect dish water beside Whittier's—and that he has just penned a Paean on the Union? I can no more comprehend what there is in the Union to make the Yankee nation adore it —than you can understand the attractions of Royalty & Aristocracy which thousands of very good people in England look on as the source & mainstay of all that is great and good in the nation. . . .


Yet Mr. Whittier himself, though thus contrasted with Longfellow, had written thanking him for his ‘Poems on Slavery,’ which in tract form, he said, ‘had been of important service to the Liberty movement.’ Whittier had also asked whether Longfellow would accept a nomination

1 Garrison's Memoirs, III. 280.

2 Weston Mss., Boston Public Library.

Boston and New York, Hougton, Mifflin and company, 1902.

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