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 Religious thougiit in the greater America 
 
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RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 IN THE 
 
 GREATER AMERICAN POETS 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 IN THE 
 
 GREATER AMERICAN POETS 
 
 BY 
 ELMER JAMES BAILEY 
 
 Assistant Professor of English in the University of Pittsburgh; 
 
 Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Pittsburgh; 
 
 Author of "The Novels of George Meredith: 
 
 A Study," "Romantic Love in 
 
 Browning's Lyrical 
 
 Poems, "etc., 
 
 etc. 
 
 "As certain even of your own poets have said" — Saint Paul 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS * 
 
 BOSTON CHICAGO 
 
 1922 
 
 <>6 
 
"k. 
 
 \E 
 
 COPTBIGHT 1922 
 
 By ELMER JAMES BAILEY 
 
 THE JOEDAN & MOKE PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 
TO 
 
 'Friendship is a sheltering tree." 
 
 Coleridge: Yoiith and Age. 
 
Mr. Bailey desires to express his gratitude to 
 Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company, Mr. John 
 Burroughs, Mr. Edward W. Emerson, Mr. T. B. 
 Harned, and Mr. Horace Traubel, for permission 
 to make use of material upon which they control 
 the copyright. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I The Point op View 1 
 
 II William Cullen Betant 10 
 
 III Edgab Allan Poe 32 
 
 IV Ralph Waldo Emerson 47 
 
 V John Gkeenleaf Whittier .... 70 
 
 VI Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . 108 
 
 VII Oliver Wendell Holmes 137 
 
 VIII James Russell Lowell 158 
 
 IX Walt Whitman 183 
 
 X The Conclusion of the Whole 
 
 Matter 229 
 
 Index 257 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 IN THE 
 
 GREATER AMERICAN POETS 
 
Religious Thought in the Greater 
 American Poets 
 
 I 
 
 THE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 Religion may be defined as adjustment of life to 
 spiritual ideals. This definition, it must be 
 acknowledged, is not adequate to all purposes and 
 occasions. From some points of view, it is too 
 broad; from others, not sufficiently specific; from 
 still others, too narrow. One person will object 
 that by it religion is taken to mean no more than 
 mere conduct; another will point out that it 
 identifies reUgion with ethics; a third will insist 
 that since it makes no distinction between true and 
 false rehgion, it leads no whither; and a fourth may 
 go so far as to reject it on the ground, that the use 
 of the term spiritual in the definition is little other 
 than sentimental. Of the last two critics, the former 
 will almost certainly hold that any religion worthy 
 of the name must demand the acceptance of the 
 Christian ideal; and the latter will perhaps assert 
 that sentimentalism in religion will seldom stop 
 much short of superstition. A number of other 
 objections might also be brought forward; yet in 
 face of all, the definition of religion as an adjust- 
 ment of life to spiritual ideals, may be allowed to 
 stand as a point of departure in the quest of dis- 
 covering to what extent religious thought is an 
 important element in American poetry. 
 
2 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 The contention, valid or invalid, that true 
 religion is necessarily Christian has no unimportant 
 bearing upon the present investigation. The 
 subject matter under examination having origi- 
 nated in the heart and brain of one or another of 
 the eight poets whom America — at least nominally 
 a Christian nation — most dehghts to honor, is 
 properly studied from a Christian point of view. 
 True, we are brought into contact with the reUgion 
 of India and that of certain ancient Greeks when 
 we approach Emerson; find ourselves skirting Islam 
 when we turn to Poe; and catch echoes of Con- 
 fucianism, of the Mosaic law, and of the slender 
 behef of the North American Indian when we read 
 Whittier, Longfellow, and the rest. Still, the 
 admixture of religions other than Christian is, 
 on the whole, but slight in our authors, and when- 
 ever assimilated, has almost certainly been Chris- 
 tianized in the process. In other words, however 
 eclectic American poets may appear to have been 
 in their religious thought, they seem not at any 
 time to have departed very far from fundamental 
 Christian doctrines, certainly never to have lost 
 sight of them. It is impossible, of course, to main- 
 tain that upon even one tenet of Christian faith 
 were the poets of America in full agreement. 
 Indeed, not one of them was completely orthodox 
 in the exact meaning of that word. Yet that they 
 were in accord neither with one another nor with 
 certain widely accepted principles is of little 
 importance here; for our poets are not being tried 
 upon the charge of heresy. The main point of 
 
The Point of View 3 
 
 interest with which we are concerned is, that they 
 passed in review this religious thought and that; 
 and, in recording their several interpretations, 
 made clear what Christianity in particular, and per- 
 haps all religion in general, meant to each of them. 
 It may be asked, however, why turn to the poets? 
 Why, if one's interest is anything more than aca- 
 demic, if one is seriously looking for a real message, 
 a substantial defense of faith, — why not go directly 
 to the theologians or at least to clergymen who, it 
 ought not to be too much to assume, have made a 
 study of rehgion in its formal, its scientific aspect, 
 and have thus fulfilled the injunction of Saint Peter 
 that they should be reac^y always to give an answer 
 to every man that asketh for a reason of the hope 
 that is within them? Surely such men, it might be 
 argued, are able to speak upon matters of faith with 
 somethiag like a nearer approach to finality than 
 can any group of writers whose preachments — 
 beautiful in form though they may be — are at 
 best but obiter dicta. To this assertion, it may be 
 opposed that there is certainly no httle gain in 
 resorting to poetry; and if it then be further 
 objected " but not so great a gain," the reply may 
 be advanced " yet at all events a different gain." 
 All science, whether it be physical, mental, or 
 spiritual, whether it be chemistry, psychology, or 
 eschatology, makes its appeal primarily by way of 
 the intellect. Yet the intellect is by no means the 
 only channel through which our complex natures 
 receive wisdom and power. The feehngs also are 
 capable of transmitting impressions and impulses 
 
4 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 which are living forces, forces which often arouse 
 us to greater activities, to firmer convictions than 
 do energies elsewhere derived. Now poetry and 
 religion, in contrast with science and theology, 
 address themselves mainly to the sensibilities. 
 Thus it comes about that many a man who has 
 lost his soul by the intellect, has regained it by the 
 feehngs; who has sacrificed it upon the altars of 
 science and theology, has received it a second time 
 from the hands of rehgion and poetry. Such a 
 man, as no other, realizes to the full a certain 
 spiritual experience which has been recorded by 
 Tennyson in his In Memoriam, — 
 
 " If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
 I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 That tumbled in the Grodless deep; 
 
 " A warmth within the breast would melt 
 
 The freezing reason's colder part; 
 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 
 Stood up and answer'd, ' I have felt.' " 
 
 Mr. Frederick Prescott recently remarked in 
 his Poetry and Dreams that the poet and the dreamer 
 are somehow alike in their faculty of vision. 
 " This relation," he went on to say, " is indicated 
 by the uses of language which, spontaneously 
 expressing the sense of mankind, often reveal 
 psychological truth not otherwise readily dis- 
 covered." Had Mr. Prescott's point of view been 
 other than it was, he might also have shown, as 
 indeed Longfellow in Prometheus once showed 
 
The Point of View 5 
 
 that the poet and the prophet — the Hebrew 
 prophet if one will — have much in common. It 
 is the popular, but wholly mistaken idea that 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Amos, to men- 
 tion no others, looked only towards the future. 
 As a matter of fact,' more frequently than not they 
 found their mission in laying their fingers upon 
 ailing spots in their own generation and in crying 
 out with no delay, so sure were they of the vahdity 
 of their message, " Thus saith the Lord! " Impas- 
 sioned as their addresses were, however, there were 
 but few among their hearers, if we beUeve the 
 records, who did not shrug their shoulders and 
 exclaim, " Dreamers! " Without attempting to 
 define, much less to call into question or to deny 
 the special inspiration ascribed by both rehgion 
 and theology to the prophets of Israel and Judah, 
 one feels safe in maintaining that many poets of a 
 later time have spoken with much the same insight 
 and power, only to meet with similar indifference 
 and scorn. The contemptuous increduUty with 
 which the children of Israel Ustened to those who 
 accused the kingdom of evil and sought to purge 
 it of its wickedness, was not essentially different 
 from that which Dante encountered when assaihng 
 the city of Florence, he pointed out its short-com- 
 ings, nor from that which Milton underwent when 
 he as fearlessly Ufted his voice against the excesses 
 of the Commonwealth as he had against those of the 
 Monarchy. 
 
 America, it is true, has produced neither a Dante 
 nor a Milton. Whatever her errors, she as yet has 
 
6 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 had no need to castigate her leaders as Browning 
 tells us Dante found necessary, 
 
 " When, his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked, 
 Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma, 
 Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment. 
 Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle. 
 Let the wretch go festering through Florence." 
 
 Neither has she had much, if any need to hear a 
 Milton urge her to " fly the Babylonian woe," or 
 tell her that " in vain doth Valour bleed while 
 Avarice and Rapine share the land," or bid her 
 generals 
 
 " Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
 Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw." 
 
 Nevertheless, our country has at no time lacked 
 poets who, even in the face of coldness and con- 
 tempt, have been ready to respond to the caU of 
 duty, eager to speak to the purpose in words of 
 fire. Whittier pleaded with America to repent her 
 of the evils which she had committed in earlier 
 days, and denounced her for permitting slavery 
 to remain in the land; Lowell's tone was by no 
 means apologetic in The Present Crisis; and Whit- 
 man's message to a later time was quite as sturdy. 
 The point here made, however, is not, that these 
 poets spoke with sincerity, but with inspiration; 
 not that they gave voice to their own feelings alone, 
 but that they felt themselves pressed on by some 
 force arising elsewhere than within. In other 
 words, they too could say, not infrequently, 
 like Hosea, the son of Beeri, " Then said the Lord 
 
The Point of View 7 
 
 unto me." Surely, whatever our understanding of 
 the theological concept of inspiration may be, it is 
 not too much to hold that the poet hke the prophet. 
 IS sometimes the mouthpie caxdLa^-powftr andjnsight 
 higher than h mng,n . He is often, it is true, but an 
 imitator, a. maker as Aristotle would have him — 
 a poet, that is, in the strict sense; he is often no 
 more than a finder, as he was held to be in the 
 Middle Ages — a troubadour, a trouvhre; but as 
 in the past he was often something beyond a mere 
 maker, a mere finder, so is he still, now and then, 
 much morei — ^he is a seer. Not only is he dowered, 
 as Tennyson says, with "the hate of hate, the 
 scorn of scorn, the love of love " ; he has greater 
 gifts, 
 
 " He sees thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, 
 
 He sees thro' his own soul. — 
 The marvel of the everlasting will, 
 
 An open scroll, 
 Before him lies." 
 
 It is the possession of this insight by the poet, 
 which makes profitable the study of his attitude 
 towards reUgion. Indeed, to many who have real 
 interest in that subject, the poet's utterances are 
 often far more illuminating, far more stimulating, 
 far more helpful, far more convincing than any- 
 thing that the theologian has to say. Matthew 
 Arnold's remark that reUgion is " the voice of the 
 deepest human experience " seems empty to some 
 men; but he who has truly experienced religion 
 knows what the English critic meant, though that 
 meaning defies statement in any other words than 
 
8 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Arnold's own. Such a man cannot doubt that 
 there is something beyond the comprehension of the 
 intellect, something with which he has mystical 
 communion, something of which he has an un- 
 speakable understanding. The psychologist and 
 the theologian may respectively explain this 
 experience to him on a materiaUstic or a spiritual 
 basis, but he gains Uttle from them. He may be 
 able to attain their point of view, to accept their 
 conclusions indeed; but he is likely to feel, perhaps 
 to insist, that they have left something out of 
 account, left something hovering obscurely in the 
 background. He therefore turns elsewhere for 
 answers to his inquiries and finds, — not answers, 
 it is true, but quieting assurances in the utterances 
 of the psalmist and the prophet, in the words that 
 fell from the lips of Jesus, and in the expressions of 
 confident belief of those who sometimes speak with 
 the tongues of men and of angels — the poets. 
 Thus entering into the way of peace, he finds that 
 he may again resort to prayer, may again walk day 
 by day with the Great Companion, may again 
 become as a little child and enter into the King- 
 dom, saved, not by the intellect, but by the feel- 
 ings; not by knowledge, but by faith; not by 
 argument, but by intuition; not by theology, but by 
 religion; not by science, but by poetry. 
 
 The poets of America especially are helpful to 
 the man who is distraught by the restlessness, 
 scepticism, and infidelity of a materiahstic age. 
 No other group of singers, it is safe to say, was 
 ever in any country in the same length of time so 
 
The Paint of View 9 
 
 deeply religious in thought, so uniformly reverent 
 in feeling and tone. The greater American poets 
 of the nineteenth century passed in review all the 
 important doctrines of Christianity and made their 
 conclusions a vital and inseparable element of their 
 writings. Escaping, too, the Scylla and Charybdis 
 of repellent dogmatism on one hand and apologetic 
 defense on the other, they were almost always 
 capable, even when giving voice to their strongest 
 convictions, of keeping within the bounds of poetic 
 expression. It is in such success that their great 
 value as rehgious teachers Ues. If literature is the 
 expression of man's permanent relations to the 
 conditions of his existence, as one writer has said; 
 if poetry is a criticism of life, as another maintains; 
 if religion really is adjustment of life to spiritual 
 ideals, then are the American poets safe leaders 
 through the valleys of scepticism and unbeUef. 
 Ever sincere, devout, and reverent, they spoke 
 with an inspiration that puts an end to doubt, 
 and lays the foundations of certainty. Those who 
 have learned the secret of Ustening to the poets, 
 have no hesitation in taking at face-value the 
 thought of Longfellow, that in the mind of the poet 
 is " truth from falsehood cleansed and sifted "; 
 the belief of Whittier, that oftentimes through him 
 and his brother-singers " the message of a truth 
 divine, the call of God is given "; and the assur- 
 ance of Lowell, that it is the poets, 
 
 " Who utter wisdom from the central deep, 
 And, hstening to the imier flow of things, 
 Speak to the age out of eternity." 
 
II 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 Critics have spent not a little time and labor in 
 verifying the tradition that the verses of WiUiam 
 Cullen Bryant's boyhood were written under the 
 immediate influence of Pope. Others take deUght 
 in pointing out that Thanatopsis was the direct 
 outcome of an interest in the poems of White, 
 Blair, and Southey. It is moreover a common- 
 place, open to question though it be, to speak of 
 Bryant as the American Wordsworth. Interesting 
 no doubt these investigations and assertions are, 
 yet they offer httle assistance to the reader who 
 approaches Bryant with the purpose of discovering 
 how far that poet has recorded his religious faith 
 in his poems. To succeed in that quest, one does 
 not go to England, he remains at home — in 
 Massachusetts in fact, — for Bryant in his religious 
 belief was clearly of Puritan heritage. On his 
 father's side he traced his ancestry to a certain 
 Stephen Bryant who was dwelling in Plymouth as 
 early as 1632; on his mother's, to that John Alden 
 of historic fame, who with many others in 1620 
 sought the shores of New England as affording a 
 place for freedom in the worship of God. 
 
 The parents to whom Wilham Cullen Bryant 
 was born plainly showed the impress of their an- 
 cestors, so conducting themselves from day to day. 
 
William Cullen Bryant 11 
 
 indeed, that the atmosphere of their cultured 
 home, although kindly, was uniformly severe and 
 restrained. In a diary which Mrs. Bryant kept for 
 fifty-three years without neglecting for a single day 
 to make an entry, she wrote on November 3, 1794, 
 "Storming, wind N. E.; churned; seven in the 
 evening, son born." It is hardly surprising that the 
 child thus ushered into the world proved frail; 
 yet to insure its health and longevity, the father, a 
 physician of much local repute, had the boy 
 plunged every morning into a spring of cold water. 
 This heroic treatment actually served its purpose; 
 the child grew and waxed strong, increasing daily 
 in stature and wisdom. 
 
 The religious atmosphere of the Bryant home was 
 quite as severe as the domestic. At the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century, when the poet was a 
 boy, the minister of the town, it may be remem- 
 bered, was a man of much importance, " his mere 
 bodily presence," as someone has said, " often 
 inspiring awe and sometimes even depression." 
 Now it happens to be recorded that the home of 
 Dr. Peter Bryant was frequented by the clergymen 
 of Cummington and the neighboring towns, and 
 by many other men whose moral ideas were of the 
 strictest type, and whose religious orthodoxy could 
 not have awakened even passing suspicion. From 
 infancy, therefore. Dr. Bryant's son was closely 
 surrounded by marked religious influences. Quite 
 naturally, as a result, he was early made acquainted 
 with the Bible as the chief textbook of the Chris- 
 tian reUgion. Something of the nature and extent 
 
12 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 of that acquaintance may be read in A Lifetime, 
 an autobiographical poem written by Bryant in 
 his eighty-second year; and certainly no one would 
 deny that something also of the impression which it 
 made upon him was reflected in much that he 
 wrote and did throughout the many fruitful years 
 of his active hfe. Though reHgion with him was 
 never a passion, as it may be said to have been with 
 Whittier; though it never became the mysticism 
 that it surely was with Emerson, it never failed 
 throughout his life to be to him a strong, informing 
 power. If his faith seems to have been at times no 
 more than an uncomplaining acceptance of his lot, 
 prayer was always to him a source of comfort and 
 help. If the rite of baptism was not performed for 
 him until he had passed well on towards the age of 
 three score years and ten, he was, none the less, 
 a constant attendant at the services of his church. 
 For him, indeed, as for the hero of his Tale of 
 Cloudland, the simple reverence which was taught 
 him in childhood, kept an unrelaxing hold upon his 
 heart. 
 
 Looking back to the man himself, the reader of 
 the present day seldom pictures Bryant as other 
 than dignified and reserved — cold perhaps. De- 
 spite his still remembered reputation for kindness, 
 courtesy, and consideration of others, he seems to 
 have stood aloof from his fellowmen. Said one who 
 knew him well, " Refined in taste, clear in mind, 
 sober in judgment, he walked among us hke a 
 Greek philosopher returned to earth." Of such a 
 man, the religion, inevitably partaking of the 
 
William Cullen Bryant 13 
 
 nature of his character, would be calm, lofty, and 
 noble. Inheriting the faith of his progenitors, 
 Bryant, it has already been said, held it firmly to 
 his death. Yet we are not to think of him as 
 merely accepting a tradition; rather, he seems to 
 have heeded the injunction of the Apostle to prove 
 all things, to hold fast that which is good. He 
 looked out across Nature and gazed back through 
 History; he observed his feUowmen and studied his 
 own heart, discovering in one or another a corrobo- 
 ration sufficient for him of the faith once deUvered 
 unto the saints. Emptying himself of every 
 predisposition to a desired conclusion, he saw that 
 the present, the past, and the future constitute a 
 procession, a panorama, a pageant. Where others 
 might perceive no more than a meaningless, 
 kaleidoscopic change, he discovered, as at the same 
 time and in the same manner the Enghsh Tennyson 
 was discovering, 
 
 " Thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
 And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of 
 the suns." 
 
 On the value of the evidence which Bryant 
 found within himself he was far from unmindful. 
 To him, as to nearly every man, the final, the most 
 convincing witness is the affirmation of the soul. 
 He knew that beyond the evidence of the senses, 
 beneath the conclusions of the intellect are certain- 
 ties founded upon the feeUngs, which are mightier 
 than those sweeping outward from any other 
 sources. Trusting himself to the strength of 
 
14 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 these tides, Bryant permitted himself to be borne 
 to ports other than those to which reason alone 
 could carry him. Clearly, he knew the power of 
 what may not inaptly be called the Higher Con- 
 viction, that spiritual experience which for him 
 found expression in The Conjunction of Jupiter and 
 Venus: — 
 
 " I -would not always reason. The straight path 
 Wearies us with the never-varying lines, 
 And we grow melancholy. I would make 
 Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit 
 Patiently by the way-side, while I traced 
 The mazes of the pleasant wilderness 
 Around me. She should be my counsellor, 
 But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs 
 Impulses from a deeper source than hers; 
 And there are motions, in the mind of man. 
 That she must look upon with awe." 
 
 Trustful of his own heart Bryant certainly was, 
 yet he also found help and inspiration in Nature. 
 She never failed to afford him a place of refuge from 
 the world. When he wished " to steal an hour 
 from study and care," he made his way to Green 
 River; when the ills of life " chafed the spirit — 
 when the unsteady pulse beat with strange flutter- 
 ings," — he sought the quiet of the woods. Like 
 Wordsworth who learned beside the river Wye that 
 " Nature never did betray the heart that loved 
 her," Bryant held " communion with her visible 
 forms " and heard her speak " a various language." 
 Earth and sky had each its message for his listen- 
 ing ear. Seed-time and harvest, vernal shower and 
 
William Cullen Bryant 15 
 
 winter snow, to him as to the speaker in The Old 
 Man's Counsel, 
 
 " Each brought, in turn, 
 Some truth, some lesson on the Uf e of man, 
 Or recognition of the Eternal Mind 
 Who veils his glory with the elements.'' 
 
 The waterfowl pursuing its solitary way " along 
 the pathless coast — the desert and illimitable 
 air," was earnest of the Power who guides the steps 
 of men aright; the fringed gentian, sturdily uplift- 
 ing its blossoms after " the keen and frosty night," 
 gave strength to the hope that in the hour of death 
 we do not wholly die; the undulating prairies 
 were the work of " the Hand that built the firma- 
 ment " ; the sea was mighty, " but a mightier 
 swayed its restless billows " ; the ancient Apen- 
 nines " wearing the glory of a brighter world, pro- 
 claimed the essential Goodness, strong and wise." 
 The glorious works of God — turn where the poet 
 would, — one perfect lesson taught, 
 
 " Eternal Love doth keep 
 In His complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep." 
 
 So closely indeed did Bryant press to Nature's 
 heart, so clearly did he understand her voice that 
 at times he became almost pagan in expression, 
 if not in thought. Listening, he heard earth, like 
 her offspring man, bewail her " childhood's unre- 
 turnipg hours," and uplift to Heaven a general 
 cry for guilt and wrong and infamy and shame. 
 Questioning the trees of the forest, he came at 
 last to believe that in their green veins there dwelt 
 
16 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 a " sense of pleasure and of pain." Not always, 
 indeed, did he give way to this mood. More often 
 he was unwilling to go further than to look upon 
 the groves a,s " God's first temples " — ancient 
 sanctuaries more befitting the rites of prayer and 
 praise than are " the roofs that our frail hands have 
 raised." Yet when he sought to lift the acceptable 
 hymn within the shadow of an ancient wood and 
 hold communion with his Maker there, the spirit 
 of the Psalmist sometimes came upon him, and he 
 dared say, as in Our Fellow Worshippers, that the 
 works of Nature uttered their thanksgivings too. 
 
 Much, however, as Bryant loved Nature, he 
 could not, any more than Wordsworth, be unre- 
 sponsive to the lessons taught by the ebb and flow 
 of human life. As the Enghsh poet, too often 
 prone to call the city dissolute, obstreperous, cruel, 
 or mean, could yet exclaim, when he looked at dawn 
 upon the beauty and the majesty of London, that 
 never before had he seen a sight so touching, or felt 
 a calm so deep; so Bryant, ready as he was to 
 assert that the world of man is full of gmlt and 
 misery, crime and shame, could yet admit, that 
 when the hour of rest hushes the voices and the 
 footsteps, the quiet of the moment breathes of Him 
 who bends above " the vast and helpless city while 
 it sleeps." Never indeed did Bryant utter words 
 more convincing or more sincere than these which 
 stand at the beginning of his Hymn of the City. 
 
William CulUn Bryant 17 
 
 " Not in the solitude 
 
 Alone may man commune with Heaven, or see, 
 
 Only in savage wood 
 And simny vale, the present Deity; 
 
 Or only hear his voice 
 Where the winds whisper and the waves rejoice. 
 
 Even here do I behold 
 Thy steps. Almighty — here, amidst the crowd 
 
 Through the great city rolled, 
 With everlasting murmur deep and loud." 
 
 Nor was this mood one caught only by chance, or 
 one quickly passing. Bryant wrote his Hymn of 
 the City in 1830; he returned nearly a decade and a 
 half later to the same theme in The Crowded 
 Street. In the latter poem he recorded his thoughts 
 as he watched the ever-shifting train of men and 
 women called hither and thither by their various 
 interests. Heedless of one another, each, he ad- 
 mitted, was bent upon his own task, his own 
 pleasure; yet the poet's keen eye not the less saw 
 the bond which made them one. " There is," he 
 knew, 
 
 " There is who heeds, who holds them all. 
 
 In His large love and boundless thought. — 
 
 These struggling tides of life that seem 
 In wayward, aimless course to tend, 
 
 Are eddies of the mighty stream 
 That roUs to its appointed end." 
 
 Bryant, however, was far from content to observe 
 no more of human life than that which surged about 
 him. He also looked back upon the panorama of 
 the past and forward to the procession of the future. 
 In Thanatopsis, although he invites us to a com- 
 
18 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 munion with Nature, he really summons us to a 
 thoughtful contemplation of that steady movement 
 of mankind towards the grave, which has already 
 swallowed up " the patriarchs of the infant world, 
 the powerful of the earth, the wise, the good, the 
 kings, the seers of ages past, all in one mighty 
 sepulchre." In The Prairies he reflects, that as on 
 those western plains the Red Man succeeded the 
 Mound Builders, and the White Man the Indian, 
 so our present civiUzation may not impossibly 
 decline before another yet unborn. In The Ages, 
 he surveys the advances already made in knowl- 
 edge, virtue, and happiness, and finds no little 
 support for his hope that love and peace shall 
 steadily increase until at last they make their 
 paradise with man. In The Flood of Years, he 
 again looks back upon the past and speaks of 
 history as a wild, rushing torrent of which the 
 foremost waves and those alone bear life. That 
 sullen stream has borne down the just and the 
 unjust, the young and the old; that sea-like flood 
 has sapped the foundations of temples and palaces, 
 fortresses and towers; that restless ocean welters 
 over memorial stones whence the inscriptions have 
 been worn away, over thrones of mighty kings, and 
 over shattered altars of long forgotten gods. But 
 the poet is not content, as he was in Thanatopsis, 
 to contemplate death as the end of all, or as he was 
 in The Ages, to hope for no more than the advance- 
 ment of the human race. If he cannot look beyond 
 the barrier which separates the Life that is, from 
 the Life that is to come, he will at least take comfort 
 
William Cullen Bryant 19 
 
 from what the wise and good have said, he will 
 believe that beyond th,e belt of darkness, the flood 
 still rolls on, gathering up and bearing gently for- 
 ward all that has been truly noble, great, or lovely. 
 
 These, then, are the main sources of Bryant's 
 rehgious belief: the Bible, the teachings of which 
 were impressed upon his mind from early child- 
 hood; the promptings of his own soul, to which he 
 often Ustened as to the voice of authority; Nature, 
 whom again and again he found to be a very present 
 help in trouble; and History, which he looked upon, 
 now as completed and monumental in the past, 
 now as being made by those whom the poet met 
 day after day, and now as dimly foreshadowed 
 in the future. These four sources determined, we 
 may turn quite properly to inquire, what were the 
 tenets of the faith which Bryant drew from them? 
 What, in other words, was the personal significance 
 to him, of the terms, God, Christ, Life, Death, and 
 ImmortaUty? 
 
 Taking up these words in order, we may safely 
 assert that God, in the poetry of Bryant, is never 
 less than a mighty force in Nature, — better, 
 perhaps, a mighty Force transcending Nature. 
 The poet thinks of Him as " the architect of the 
 universe " : the heavens are the works of His 
 fingers; the moon and the stars are of His ordain- 
 ing; He moulded in His hand the globe; He 
 filled the chambers of the sky with " the ever 
 flowing air " ; the sea is His, He made it, and His 
 hand prepared the dry land. And amid these 
 glorious works of His, God Himself is ever present. 
 
20 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 He fills the solitude. He is " in the soft wind that 
 runs along the summit of the trees "; He is in the 
 thunderbolt, the volcano, and the earthquake. 
 He is everywhere immanent; He is at work now, 
 even as He was at work in the earliest days of 
 creation. Nor ivith Bryant does the conception 
 of the Supreme Being end here, as it does with 
 many men. If it did, God might justly be looked 
 upon as no more to the poet than a term for that 
 force which the physicist asserts is inherent in 
 matter and which must therefore inevitably end 
 with matter; — as no more than a personification 
 of that vast energy which, somewhat grudgingly, 
 the scientist has to admit he has never wholly 
 measured, and the inventor to acknowledge he can 
 hardly hope ever completely to harness. Now 
 Bryant is a poet; he is not a scientist; neither, 
 in the ordinary sense of the word, is he an inventor. 
 And because he is a poet, he beheves that his 
 vision is sure. To him, God is no mere blind force 
 upbuilding only to unbuild; no unreasoning power, 
 careless whether it creates or whether it destroys; 
 no mighty energy acting unknowingly, yet neces- 
 sarily in accordance with laws which in their 
 entirety shall sooner or later be formulated by 
 the mind of man. Beyond a doubt, God, to Bry- 
 ant, is far more than any of these things: He is 
 " the Soul of this great universe," He is indwelling 
 Life, He preserves all things in harmony, guiding 
 the uttermost stars in their courses and watching 
 with infinite care the sparrow's flight. 
 And He without whose care not a single sparrow 
 
William Cullen Bryant 21 
 
 falleth, bends, the poet more than once asserts, 
 in special love above the race which He has stamped 
 with His own image. A Power who pities man. 
 He numbers every secret tear, His hand touches 
 the wounded heart and it is healed. He guides the 
 feet of those who trust Him; He watches over the 
 fate of nations. Though for a time He sends His 
 rain upon the just and the unjust. He marks the 
 bounds of guilty powers; though for a time the 
 wicked tread their brethren down and feel no awe 
 of Him who will avenge them, He, long-suffering, 
 hears the cry of the oppressed, and in His own 
 appointed time sets the captive free. Bryant's 
 conception of God is indeed that of the Apostle: 
 in Him we Uve and move and have our being; 
 after Him we may feel and surely find Him, for 
 He is not far from any one of us, and we are, beyond 
 a doubt, His offspring. Unfaltering in his trust, 
 Bryant was confident that the time must come when 
 men shall see that Might and Right move hand in 
 hand. Truth at times may be crushed to earth; 
 but none the less the eternal years of God are hers: 
 she yet shall rise in triumph over error wounded, 
 writhing, dying. There yet shall be, he points 
 out in Among the Trees, a nobler age than ours, an 
 age when in the eternal strife between good and 
 evU, God shall be seen God, ruling as uncon- 
 querable Law. 
 
 Of the Holy Spirit — the Comforter, that is the 
 Strengthener — whose work it is to turn the hearts 
 of men to find the better way, Bryant makes men- 
 tion certainly at least once, and quite as certainly 
 
22 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 not above twice. It may therefore be concluded 
 that the doctrine of the Third Person of the Trinity 
 was one into which Bryant did not care to enter. 
 Be that as it may, he found the doctrine of the 
 Christ of great interest. Perhaps, it may not 
 unjustly be said that in the poet's mind, the Holy 
 Spirit was as vaguely defined, and the Christ quite 
 as clearly defined as they are to the majority of 
 those who profess and call themselves Christians. 
 If on one hand he barely mentioned the work and 
 personality of the Holy Ghost, on the other he 
 pictured Christ as Jesus, the son of Mary, whose 
 blessed feet well knew the fields of Galilee; and 
 as the only begotten Son of God, who being lifted 
 up, won for man the boon of eternal life. 
 
 Of the great doctrine of Christ as the Word, the 
 Word that was with God, the Word that was God, 
 no traces exist in the poetry of Bryant. The beUef 
 that Christ was pre-existent to His incarnation as 
 the Nazarene, seems not at any time to have been 
 in the poet's mind. But of those thirty-three 
 wondrous years when God made His culminating 
 manifestation of Himself in being very man, Bryant 
 did not hesitate to accept the four great records 
 which, though beaten upon by vicious ridicule and 
 undermine^ by destructive criticism, still stand 
 unshaken. To Bryant, we may gather from his 
 numerous Hymns, the lustre of the star did indeed 
 lead the kings of the East to Bethlehem; the 
 blessed Virgin bent above the manger wherein 
 lay her Holy Child, and later treasured in her heart 
 the strange prophetic sayings of His ripening 
 
William Cullen Bryant 23 
 
 youth. At His word Cana's water changed to 
 wine, the blind received their sight, and the dead 
 arose to life. In Christ the poet saw the Great 
 Exemplar, saw Him drawing all men unto Himself, 
 saw Him rising from the tomb, saw Him ascending 
 into Heaven, saw Him as One upon whose Body we 
 in our hearts may truly feed by faith, and of whose 
 Blood we may as surely drink, in remembrance of 
 that hour when He made a full, perfect, and suffi- 
 cient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the 
 sins of the whole world. Manifestly, too, we may 
 conclude from The Song of the Sower, Bryant looked 
 upon the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as the 
 crowning service of the Church. Far more to him 
 than a mere, ordinary memorial was the con- 
 secrated bread of the communion table. That 
 mystic loaf, he saw, did in some true way unite the 
 beUever to the risen Lord. 
 
 It is perhaps not too much to assert that it was 
 Bryant's contemplation of the life of Christ which 
 ultimately led him to confident beUef in the im- 
 mortality of the soul. Certainly that beUef, if not 
 indeed absent from the thought of his early years, 
 was at that time no more than latent. Urgent 
 as Nature was in her summons to him, she seemed 
 at times to speak the chilling words, death ends aU. 
 Nor was History much more comforting: she held 
 out but one promise, we live through our influence 
 for good. Often as the concluding Unes of Thana- 
 topsis are quoted to bring comfort in the hour of 
 death, they really contain nothing but an exhorta- 
 tion that we conduct ourselves not less worthily 
 
24 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 than the great dead, with whom we shall inevitably 
 be associated in the grave. " So live," the poet 
 writes, 
 
 " So Kve, that when thy summons comes to join 
 The innumerable caravan, which moves 
 To that mysterious reahn, where each shall take 
 His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
 Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night, 
 Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
 By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, 
 Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
 About him, and Hes down to pleasant dreams." 
 
 In these Unes Bryant is Hebraic rather than 
 apocalyptic; he shows the spirit of the writer of 
 Ecclesiastes rather than of Saint John in Patmos. 
 He seems to say with calm resignation, " The 
 dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the 
 spirit shall return unto God who gave it." When 
 he so wrote, his eyes had not been opened to the 
 larger vision. Not yet could he accept the saying 
 of the beloved disciple, " God shall wipe away all 
 tears from their eyes, and there shall be no 
 more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall 
 there be any more pain." 
 
 Readers of Bryant discover' that the poet's 
 thoughts upon the subject of immortaUty were as 
 fluctuating as those of other men. Denial, doubt, 
 hope, and confidence were constantly interchanging 
 with one another in his mind, or mingling there in 
 varying degrees. At times, it has already been 
 pointed out, he saw no more than that where " the 
 glittering current of life " once flowed, the dust 
 
William Cullen Bryant 25 
 
 alone remained. Undismayed at this prospect, 
 however, he did not hesitate to apostrophize Death 
 as a friend to mankind, " a deliverer of the op- 
 pressed, a reformer always on Virtue's side." 
 Equally stoical could he be at an old man's funeral, 
 dismissing him calmly with the words, " It was his 
 time to die." Though the shock of his father's 
 death led Bryant in early manhood to express the 
 hope that a happier Ufe should dawn to waken the 
 insensible dust, he some years later, in The Death 
 of the Flowers, gave voice to no more than resigna- 
 tion — resignation without hope — as he recalled 
 the death of a much loved sister. Still further, 
 even when he contemplated his own dissolution, 
 he thought of himself as passing away " as silently 
 as the South Wind passes " ; as departing from sin 
 and suffering to his appointed place, murmuring 
 the names of those whom he loved; as falling asleep 
 beside the undying rivulet which, forever singing 
 down its narrow course, should " mock the fading 
 race of men." 
 
 The time came, however, when no more than 
 any other human being could Bryant be content 
 with the thought of annihilation of personality. 
 There was no abiding comfort for him in the 
 surety that we shall be remembered for a time by 
 those whom we leave behind, or in the behef that 
 our influence continues forever in constantly widen- 
 ing circles. These thoughts could not make him 
 look upon old age as less than dreary, upon death 
 as other than death. The question asked in the 
 concluding stanza of Life would obtrude itself, 
 
26 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " When we descend to dust again, 
 Where shall the final dwelling be 
 Of thought and aU its memories then, 
 My love for thee, and thine for me?" 
 
 Could it be possible, he asked, that he who had for 
 a time been " a part of the brightness of God " 
 should utterly cease to be? dared he hope that 
 his soul might survive the destruction of the body? 
 To these questions he found some faint answer in 
 Nature. Life might perhaps be analogous to the 
 mist which, though " a child of earth cleaving to 
 earth," did nevertheless, vanish from human sight 
 and become a part of the glorious sky. Or yet 
 again death might be Uke night which, however 
 dark, must give place at last to the resplendent 
 day with all its " warmth and certainty and bound- 
 less light." 
 
 Doubt thus made way for hope in Bryant's 
 spiritual life, partly because the heart's desire for 
 immortality cannot be stifled, and partly because 
 Nature, however comfortless she may be at times, 
 offers now and then not a httle support to behef. 
 This hope, moreover, itself became at length trans- 
 formed into conviction that Christ really rose from 
 the dead and that even as He returned from the 
 grave, so also shall we. Perceiving that man, 
 made in the image of God, has ever transcended 
 Nature, Bryant felt it but in keeping with divine 
 righteousness and divine economy that the soul of 
 man should not wholly die. True, at the threshold 
 of middle Ufe, Bryant in The Past cried out in pain, 
 
William CuUen Bryant 27 
 
 " My spirit yearns to bring 
 
 The lost ones back — yearns with desire intense, 
 
 And struggles hard to wring 
 Thy bolts apart, and pluck thy captives thence. 
 
 In vain; thy gates deny 
 All passage save to those who hence depart; 
 
 Nor to the streaming eye 
 Tho' giv'st them back — nor to the broken heart." 
 
 This cry, however, is not to be interpreted as com- 
 ing from one who sorrowed without hope. Rather 
 it was an expression of the longing of the eye, of 
 the ear, of the flesh for satisfaction; it was the call 
 of one who, out of the depths of loneliness, desired 
 a present comfort. Depressed though he at times 
 might be, Bryant did not lose hold upon " that 
 Mighty One," who — as we find him saying now in 
 one poem, now in another, — " gave His life for 
 His sheep "; or " went before to prepare a place 
 for His meek followers"; or "as a Conqueror 
 passed the dread barriers, yet returned." Faith 
 indeed became to the poet the substance, the assur- 
 ance of things hoped for, the evidence, the convic- 
 tion of things not seen. Christ to him was not 
 merely the Mighty Sufferer who, despised and 
 rejected of men, bore long years ago a grievous 
 weight of pain and scorn, but the Risen Lord: 
 not the God of the dead, but as in The Conqueror's 
 Grave, the God of the living, 
 
 " He who returning glorious from the grave 
 Dragged death, disarmed, in chains, a crouching slave." 
 
 Taking his stand upon that highest pinnacle of 
 Christian faith, holding that the resurrection of 
 
28 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Christ is the abiding proof that our hope is not 
 vain, Bryant, undismayed could look forth as 
 from a Pisgah height and discern, dimly indeed, 
 but none the less discern, that land which the 
 Lord Himself hath prepared for those that love 
 Him. Within that country, within that world 
 upon whose borders we but hover for a space, only 
 the nobler part of us shall live. 
 
 " All that of good or fair 
 
 Has gone into the tomb from earliest time, 
 
 Shall then come forth to wear 
 The glory and the beauty of its prime. 
 
 " They have not perished — no! 
 
 Kind words, remembered voices once so sweet. 
 
 Smiles, radiant long ago, 
 And features, the great soul's apparent seat, 
 
 " All shall come back; each tie 
 
 Of pure affection shall be knit again; 
 
 Alone shall Evil die. 
 And Sorrow dwell a prisoner in thy reign.'' 
 
 There, the poet in The Flood of Years again 
 assures us, no grief shall assail the heart, no tender 
 ties be broken; past sorrows, too, will be forgotten, 
 or but remembered to make the new life sweeter; 
 wounded hearts shall then be healed forever; 
 parted friends wiU be once more united, hands will 
 be clasped in joy unspeakable, and the mother's 
 arms will again be folded about the child over whose 
 loss she had bowed herself in suffering. Without 
 such conscious reunion there cannot be, the poet 
 felt, true happiness in Heaven. The sting of cease- 
 
William Cullen Bryant 29 
 
 less pain, he saw, must be our lot if we look in vain 
 for " the gentle presence loved on earth," if we fail 
 to hear once more " the voice so sweet in former 
 days," if we cannot " read again the tender thought 
 in eyes serene." In questions that permit but 
 one answer, the poet cried out, ia The Future Life, 
 to her who had been his perfect companion on 
 earth, 
 
 " Will not thy own meek heart demand me there? 
 
 That heart whose fondest throbs to me were given — 
 My name on earth was ever in thy prayer, 
 And wilt thou never utter it in heaven? 
 
 " In meadows fanned by heaven's Ufe-breathing wind, 
 In the resplendence of that glorious sphere, 
 And larger movements of the unfettered mind, 
 Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here? 
 
 " E'en though thou wear'st the glory of the sky, 
 Wilt thou not keep the same beloved name, 
 The same fair thoughtful brow, and gentle eye, 
 Lovelier in heaven's sweet climate, yet the same? , 
 
 " Shalt thou not teach me, in that calmer home. 
 The wisdom that I learned so ill in this — 
 The wisdom which is love — till I become 
 Thy fit companion in that land of bUss? " 
 
 Before this perfect reunion, certain as he con- 
 sidered it, a period of time, Bryant believed in 
 accordance with various passages of Scripture, 
 must elapse. Not infrequently he seems to have 
 held that the souls of the dead sleep dreamlessly, 
 awaiting a reunion with the body when the angel 
 shall sound the trumpet of the resurrection. Now 
 
30 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 and then, however, he ventured a more comforting 
 thought: once he suggested the possibility of 
 aerial beings' joining in our earthly worship with 
 harmonies too fine for mortal ear to appreciate; 
 twice he gave voice to the possibility that, although 
 the dead can send no direct messages to the living, 
 they may in some way be enabled to prompt the 
 generous act and gently draw our restless, wander- 
 ing thoughts from treacherous paths that end in 
 sin; and twice again, with even greater certainty, 
 he went so far as to assert that the spirits of the 
 dead continue to haunt, for a time^t least, the rocks 
 and streams they knew of old. The conviction of 
 the prophet and seer is found in the lines which 
 stand at the end of The Two Graves, 
 
 " They are here, — they are here, . . . 
 In the yellow sunshine and flowing air. 
 In the light cloud-shadows that slowly pass 
 In the sounds that rise from the murmuring grass. 
 
 " They walk by the waving edge of the wood, 
 And list to the long-accustomed flow 
 Of the brook that wets the rocks below, — 
 Patient, and peaceful, and passionless. 
 As seasons on seasons swiftly press, 
 They watch, and wait, and Unger round." 
 
 BeUef in a personal immortaUty beneath the 
 sway of a just and righteous God is to many a man 
 the final solution of all the serious problems of our 
 restless, questioning life. Certainly long before 
 his death Bryant, by attaining that belief, entered 
 into peace — the peace which the Apostle asserted 
 
William Cullen Bryant 31 
 
 passeth all understanding. Devious had been the 
 paths which the poet had followed, yet all had 
 made toward the goal at which he finally arrived. 
 Nature, History, study, contemplation, reflection, 
 each helped him to gain insight into the ways 
 of God. Sorrow, pain, affiction, loss, each in the 
 long run strengthened his hope, until hope itself 
 was lost in the conviction that, though the body 
 die, the soul persists, mindful of all that made life 
 sweet, forgetful of all that made life bitter. Thus 
 it was that long before Bryant had reached old 
 age, patience had wrought its perfect work within 
 his heart. As we read the noble poem Waiting by 
 the Gate, we plainly see that no shrinking marred 
 the poet's faith when he approached the bounds of 
 life. Though by reason of his strength his years 
 were literally four-score years, yet was his step 
 firm, his eye uplifted, his brow serene. No doubt, 
 no dread dogged his path; he bade good-night with 
 words of cheer, full certain that he should awaken 
 from the sleep of death, refreshed and strong. 
 
Ill 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 It is popular opinion that the most minute 
 research into the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe will 
 not meet with any discovery that can be called 
 even remotely reUgious — much less Christian. 
 It is readily admitted, of course, that Poe makes 
 frequent mention of cherubim and seraphim, of 
 angels and demons, of soul and spirit, of heaven 
 and hell; yet it is quite hkely to be added without 
 delay that these terms are hardly more than mere 
 words in a poet's unusually musical vocabulary, 
 and must therefore be looked upon as not so much 
 as even hinting at any article of faith. To one 
 who attempts to assert that there is any positive 
 rehgious teaching whatever in the poetry of Poe, 
 it will be pointed out that the poet makes quite 
 as ready use of names drawn from paganism and 
 Islam as from Judaism and Christianity, that he 
 gives no preference to the Eden of the Hebrews 
 over the Aidenn of the Arabians, and that he speaks 
 of the works of Eblis as no less certainly evil than 
 those of Satan. Beyond a doubt, angels and 
 ghouls, fairies and elves, naiads and dryads, are 
 all equally real to Poe. With him Edis, the Tartar 
 divinity presiding over virtuous love takes the 
 place of the Greek Aphrodite; the Phoenician 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 33 
 
 Astarte and the Latin Diana, each the goddess 
 of birth, are presented side by side; and Azrael of 
 the Tahnud, the angel who awaits the separation of 
 the soul from the body at the moment of death, 
 is not inferior to Israfel of the Koran, that melo- 
 dious spirit " whose heart-strings are a lute," 
 and who, possessed of the sweetest voice of all 
 God's creatures, stands ready to sound the trumpet 
 of the resurrection. 
 
 The contention of those who maintain that no 
 religious thought is discoverable in Poe might 
 perhaps be allowed to stand, were it not that the 
 instances which they almost always adduce in 
 support of their assertions, prove too much. 
 Faihng to find anything in Poe that is strohgly 
 Christian, they cite his frequent use of non-Chris- 
 tian terms to show that he is not reUgious at all. 
 It ought not to be necessary to point out that before 
 one speaks in criticism of any work of literature, 
 one should take pains to become acquainted with 
 the author's point of view and method of expres- 
 sion. All the beings whose names are recorded in 
 the poetry of Poe — whether they are Hebrew or 
 Christian, pagan or Moslem — had, to Poe's mind, 
 a very real place in that strange land created by his 
 delicate yet vivid imagination. Insufficiently 
 material to be of the earth, earthy; insufficiently 
 spiritual to be of the heaven, heavenly, they were to 
 the man who created them, as they are still to his 
 appreciative readers, true shadows, albeit inhabit- 
 ing a world which is hardly more than a shadow. 
 They constitute, indeed, what Poe in another 
 
34 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 connection has himself denominated a dream within 
 a dream. 
 
 The vagueness of the reahn created by Poe may 
 be safely regarded as the outcome of his theory of 
 just what poetry is. Early in life Poe, writing to a 
 friend, asserted that in his opinion, " A poem is 
 opposed to romance by having for its object, an 
 indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a 
 poem only so far as this object is attained; ro- 
 mance presenting perceptible images with definite, 
 poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end 
 music is an essential, since the comprehension of 
 sweet sound is our most indefinite conception." 
 With this point of view in mind, one readily per- 
 ceives the reason on one hand of the tenuous, the 
 evanescent character of Poe's world of fancy; 
 and on the other of his ready acceptance of proper 
 names which make the inhabitants of his spiritual 
 world an assemblage hardly less mixed — hardly 
 less cosmopolitan, if the word will be allowed — 
 than was, let us say, Milton's once happy throng of 
 angels before a part of them were lost and changed 
 through pride. The undeviating use of terms which 
 fall quite readily from the lips of western theolo- 
 gians in discussing their exceedingly accurate 
 ideas of heaven must almost certainly have ended, 
 to Poe's way of thinking, in an image altogether too 
 definite. It is not beyond thought, indeed, that 
 even Saint John's minutely circumstantial descrip- 
 tion of the heavenly Jerusalem was to Poe most 
 veritable prose. On the other hand, the mythology 
 of the Greeks or the Romans, and the religious 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 35 
 
 conceptions of Mahomet contained for him many 
 names of pecuUar value. When they are used, 
 their denotation in the minds of nearly all readers 
 is so slight as to leave but an indefinite impression 
 — nevertheless they are rich in connotation, in 
 suggestiveness. Still further their mere sound is 
 often exceedingly beautiful — frequently all but 
 music itself. To the attuned ear, for an instance, 
 there is an unusual pleasure in such a word as 
 Israfel and its doublet Israfeli. . Thus it came about 
 that Poe sought the elements of his spiritual world 
 where he would, and seized upon them wherever 
 he found them. 
 
 In that vague, indefinite world of Poe's, pictured 
 to the reader through the use of musical words 
 borrowed from many far-separated sources, the 
 personality of God, although seldom mentioned 
 and almost as rarely referred to, is given a pecuUar, 
 perhaps a quite convincmg, vividness. This im- 
 pression does not arise from the poet's asserting 
 that his God has or has not lent him " respite and 
 nepenthe from his memories of Lenore," or from 
 his writing in The Sleeper, 
 
 " I pray to Gtod that she may lie 
 Forever with unopened eye, 
 While the dim sheeted ghosts go by! " 
 
 Such passages have their value, no doubt, but two 
 others may be cited to prove the existence in Poe 
 of that state of miud which attends the rare experi- 
 ence of every believer when he feels that he stands 
 in the immediate presence of God Himself. The 
 first of these constitutes the great part of the poem 
 
36 , Religion in American Poetry 
 
 entitled Silence. Read attentively, it is seen to be 
 the expression of that surpassing sense of trust 
 which arises in the soul of man when the heart is all- 
 confounded beneath the Overpowering Mystery. 
 
 " There is a two-fold Silence — sea and shore — 
 Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places, 
 Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces, 
 Some human memories and tearful lore 
 Kender him terrorless: his name's ' No More.' 
 He is the corporate Silence: dread Ih'tti not! 
 
 No power hath he of evil in himself; 
 But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!) 
 
 Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf 
 That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod 
 No foot of man), commend thyself to God! " 
 
 The very strength of this passage Hes in its vague- 
 ness. No man but has some time had the experi- 
 ence here set down; yet no man, — try as he may, 
 — can give that experience greater definiteness. 
 
 The second passage is found in the early un- 
 named poem beginning, 
 
 " In youth have I known one with whom the Earth, 
 In secret, communing held." 
 
 The reader soon discovers that the poet is conscious 
 of an unseen, yet personal Presence, half doubted, 
 yet not wholly dismissible. 
 
 " Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought 
 To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o'er; 
 
 But I will half believe that wild light fraught 
 With more of sovereignty than ancient lore 
 
 Hath ever told; — or is it of a thought 
 The unembodied essence, and no more 
 
 That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass 
 
 As dew of the night-time o'er the summer grass? " 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 37 
 
 Here again is the indefinite, the vague; yet the 
 poet's conclusion is illuminating. His answer to 
 his own question is, — 
 
 " "Tis a symbol and a token 
 Of what in other worlds shall be, — and given 
 
 In beauty by our God to those alone 
 Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven." 
 
 Philosophically considered, this experience, one 
 critic tells us, is the unblinding of the poet to the 
 Spirit of Beauty; poetically considered, it is, 
 according to Byron, whom Poe himself quotes, the 
 intense reply of Nature's intelligence to ours; 
 religiously considered, it is, to the mind of the 
 beUever, a manifestation of God. 
 
 To complete our understanding of Poe's concep- 
 tion of God — at least in so far as he saw fit to 
 reveal it in his verse — we must bring another 
 poem under levy. In Al Aaraaf, the angel Nesace 
 is vouchsafed an answer to her prayer; yet this 
 record of an exhibition of divine grace is of far less 
 importance to us than the assertion that of all the 
 spheres which whirl in the heavens, ours is " the 
 favored one of God." Still, though thus favored, 
 it is found wanting in the balance. We hear a tone 
 of regret when 
 
 " In realms on high 
 The eternal voice of God is passing by 
 And the red winds are withering in the sky," — 
 
 a tone of regret that our world, " Unked to a little 
 system and one sun," is a world 
 
38 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Where all God's love is folly, and the crowd 
 Still think His terrors but the thunder cloud, 
 The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath." 
 
 Meagre as are the passages thus far laid under 
 contribution, we may conclude from them that to 
 Poe's mind the Supreme Being is a personal God 
 to whom men and angels may address their prayers 
 with an expectation of reply. If He must be re- 
 garded as a Being beyond the comprehension of 
 man, He none the less gives to the human soul a 
 sense of nearness, especially in hours of terror and 
 dread, and, sometimes, a not incomprehensible 
 message to the heart. Still further Poe gives 
 indication of beUeving that, though God holds the 
 heavens as a very little thing in the hoUow of His 
 hand, He not the less bends above our earth in 
 special soHcitation and ceases not to care for the 
 children of men. Expressing the idea in the terms 
 of the theologian, one is safe in saying that Poe's 
 conception of God is theistic. Despite his men- 
 tion of heathen deities and his attribution of 
 personahty to them, he apparently held to a belief 
 in the existence of one God transcending the 
 universe in His personality, yet immanent in it in 
 His knowledge and action. 
 
 Whatever Poe's attitude towards God may have 
 been, no trace of the idea of the Trinity can any- 
 where be discovered in his poetry. The Holy 
 Spirit is never mentioned or His existence even most 
 remotely implied. To the Son, it is true, there is an 
 occasional reference; but the expression, " For the 
 Holy Jesus' sake," and the address to the Virgin 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 39 
 
 as the Mother of God, hardly leads one to think 
 that Poe's mind had dwelt upon the great doctrines 
 of the Incarnation and the Atonement. True, 
 in the dramatic monologue of Tamerlane, the dying 
 conqueror speaks to a monk, but he tells his story- 
 only after he has assured his listener that no power 
 of earth can shrive his dying soul of the sin his 
 unearthly pride has revelled in. Again, in the 
 drama PoUtian, a priest enters, and some use is 
 made of a crucifix; still, there is nothing to show 
 that Poe himself reacted upon the great central 
 fact of Christianity. Rather may we assume that 
 his real attitude towards Jesus of Nazareth is to 
 be found in certain lines of The Coliseum. There 
 the poet exclaims as he gazes upon what he calls 
 " the rich reliquary of lofty contemplation left to 
 Time," — 
 
 " I kneel, an altered and an humble man, 
 Amid thy shadows, and so drink within 
 My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory! 
 
 " Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld! 
 Silence! and Desolation! and dim night! 
 I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength — 
 O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king 
 Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane! " 
 
 All things considered, therefore, it must be admit- 
 ted that although Poe's conception of God is 
 theistic, it is not in the strict sense, — perhaps not 
 in any sense, — Christian. 
 
 In passing, attention may properly be called to 
 Poe's occasional use of the Scriptures. In PoUtian 
 
40 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 the sorrowful Lalage asks for a copy of the Holy 
 Evangelists since, — 
 
 " If there be balm 
 For the wounded spirit in Gilead, it is there! 
 Dew in the night time of my bitter trouble 
 Will there be foimd — " dew sweeter far than that 
 Which hangs Like chains of pearl on Hermon hill." 
 
 It is of some little interest perhaps to observe that 
 the expression " balm in Gilead," taken from the 
 book of the prophet Jeremiah, occurs also in The 
 Raven; and that the passage which makes mention 
 of the dew of Hermon, drawn from the one hundred 
 and thirty-third Psahn, reappears almost word for 
 
 word in the hnes which bear the title To . 
 
 Again the words, " Let there be light," are so 
 used in the poem. To M. L. S. that beyond a doubt 
 they must have been quoted from the first chapter 
 of Genesis; and of course the opening words of the 
 threnody, Lenore, "Ah! broken is the golden 
 bowl " is a reminiscence of the well-known passage 
 in the book of Ecclesiastes. Finally, Poe in the 
 notes appended to Al Aaraaf twice makes quota- 
 tions from the Bible, first that beautiful expression 
 from the Revelation of Saint John, " and golden 
 vials full of odors which are the prayers of the 
 saints " and later those tender words from the one 
 hundred and twenty-first Psalm, " The sun shall 
 not harm thee by day, nor the moon by night." 
 The very attractiveness of all these quotations, 
 however, and the uses to which they are put, show 
 plainly that they appeal to Poe primarily through 
 their harmonious diction. His incorporation of 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 41 
 
 them into his work, therefore, proves but little, 
 certainly it gives no more accurate insight into the 
 state of his mind and belief than does his adapta- 
 tion of a passage of the Koran to stand at the head 
 of his poem Israfel. 
 
 Turning now to Poe's thoughts upon the ques- 
 tion of life beyond the grave, we find that they 
 range all the way from a dull conception of death 
 as a sleep to a full certainty of a conscious, — 
 possibly an active immortaUty. Never quite 
 descending to the depth of thinking that death 
 ends all, he not the less quietly — perhaps gladly — 
 utters in Al Aaraaf the words, 
 
 " Beyond that death no immortaUty — 
 But sleep that pondereth and is not " to be " — 
 And there — oh! may my weary spirit dwell — 
 Apart from Heaven's Eternity — and yet how far from 
 HeUl " 
 
 This longing for sleep is evidently not a condition 
 in which the mind is inactive. Indeed, the dead 
 man who speaks the hues entitled For Annie fully 
 apprehends his state and quite contentedly accepts 
 his lot. 
 
 " Thank heaveni the crisis — 
 
 The danger is past, ' 
 Ajid the fever called ' Living ' 
 
 Is conquered at last. 
 
 ' And ah! let it never 
 
 Be foohshly said 
 That my room it is gloomy 
 And narrow my bed — 
 
42 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 For a man never slept 
 
 In a difierent bed; 
 And to sleep, you must slumber 
 
 In just such a bed." 
 
 Yet mere quiet, satisfj^ng sleep is not the only 
 gain from death. The tantaUzed spirit Hes wholly 
 at peace, bathing in many a dream of the truth, 
 recalling the beauty of Annie, remembering with 
 joy that moment of death when, the lover says, 
 
 " She tenderly kissed me, 
 And fondly caressed. 
 And then I fell gently 
 To sleep on her breast. 
 
 " And she prayed to the angels 
 To keep me from harm — 
 To the queen of the angels 
 To shield me from harm." 
 
 Poe, however, was not always in a mood to be 
 satisfied with what may perhaps be called passive 
 immortality. At times he rose to a full conviction 
 that the soul passes to another plane of existence. 
 In Lenore, he exclaimed, 
 
 " To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is. 
 
 riven — 
 Prom Hell into a high estate far up within the Heaven — 
 From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of 
 
 Heaven." 
 
 There, in the presence of that King, Poe implied, 
 one may hope for the conscious reunion of souls. 
 Says the speaker in The Raven, eagerly adjuring his 
 visitor. 
 
Edga^ Allan Poe 43 
 
 " By that Heaven that bends above us — by that God we 
 both adore — 
 Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant 
 
 Aidenn, 
 It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels call Lenore — 
 Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels call 
 Lenore." 
 
 Although the answer to this appeal was a dis- 
 heartening " Nevermore," we need not interpret 
 the reply as an expression of disbeUef in the 
 possibility of immortality, — rather was it the 
 word of final judgment upon a soul which had in 
 some way made itself unworthy of such happiness 
 as it longed for. In striking contrast stands 
 another lover created by the fancy of Poe. He 
 asks no question, would brook, we may be sure, no 
 condemnation, no refusal. Sure of himself, his 
 love, and his fate, he cries out with that passionate 
 conviction which is nothing less than truth, 
 
 " Neither the angels in Heaven above, 
 Nor the demons down under the sea, 
 Can ever dissever my soul from the soul 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee." 
 
 Approaching the question of immortality from 
 still another point of view, we discover that Poe 
 in one place addresses a poem to a soul in Paradise 
 as though that soul could hear the words that fall 
 from mortal Ups; that in Dreamland he mentions 
 
 " White robed forms of friends long given. 
 In agony, to the Earth — and Heaven " ; 
 
 and that in Spirits of the Dead, a poem in which he 
 speaks of death as inevitable, he urges a noble and 
 
44 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 fearless adjustment of the soul to that great hour 
 of change. 
 
 " Be silent in that solitude 
 
 Which is not loneliness — for then 
 The spirits of the dead who stood 
 
 In life before thee, are again 
 In death around thee — and their will 
 Shall overshadow thee; be still. 
 
 " The night — tho' clear — shall frown, 
 And the stars shall not look down 
 From their high thrones in the Heaven 
 With light like Hope to mortals given, — 
 But their red orbs without beam, 
 To thy weariness shall seem 
 As a burning and a fever 
 Which would cling to thee forever." 
 
 These lines, despite the strength, the resignation 
 which their author perhaps hoped they would 
 impart, bring us face to face with that horror of 
 death which nearly two hundred years of Christian 
 faith and hope have failed appreciably to eradicate 
 from the heart of man. For Poe this horror always 
 had a pecuUar fascination. It drew him so insis- 
 tently, in fact, that, look where he would, all things 
 seemed to partake of its ominous nature. In its 
 own character it is the fundamental thought of 
 The City in the Sea; somewhat softened indeed, 
 yet none the less repellent, it becomes the horror of 
 insanity in The Haunted Palace; stiU sinister, it 
 is the horror of nightmare in Dreamland; and 
 finally strident, discordant, soul-wracking, it is the 
 horror of life in The Conqueror Worm. 
 
 All things taken into consideration, the poetry 
 
Edgar Allan Poe 45 
 
 of Poe offers little to the soul which questions or 
 doubts, — far less to the heart which seeks help 
 or comfort. Undoubtedly Poe beheved in God, a 
 Being who, because He hears and perhaps answers 
 prayer, must be deemed personal; yet so vaguely 
 does the poet define that personality that one is 
 not lifted even momentarily into a state of cer- 
 tainty, confidence, or trust. Almost as certainly, 
 Poe also believed that the soul persists after the 
 death of the body; but in his expression of this 
 faith, he was often not less vague than he was when 
 he spoke of his behef in God. Not seldom, it has 
 to be added, his ideas are dangerously near being 
 repulsive, and often they are an expression, not so 
 much of hope, as of despair. Beyond these tenets 
 of God and immortality — tenets which, as he 
 phrases them, are far more pagan than Christian 
 in character — the religion of Poe did not reach. 
 In other words, the spiritual beUef of the most 
 musical of American poets, say the best that we 
 can, was poverty-stricken. 
 
 It is quite useless to inquire, had Poe's behef been 
 richer, would his life have been happier? or had 
 his life been happier, would his behef have been 
 richer? The most cursory acquaintance with the 
 life of Edgar Allan Poe shows that, Uke the speaker 
 in The Raven, he was one 
 
 " Whom unmerciful Disaster 
 Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden 
 
 bore — 
 Till the dirges of his Hope the melancholy burden bore 
 Of ' Never — nevermore.' " 
 
46 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 No poet ever deserved our pity more — neither 
 Byron, nor Shelley, nor Keats. The slender pipe 
 on which he blew gave forth but few tones — "most 
 musical, most melancholy." From his poetry 
 one cannot gain religiously either the higher uplift 
 or the broader outlook; yet one whose behef has 
 become settled, whose faith is at poise, lays down 
 the poetry of Poe in no spirit of harsh criticism. 
 Poe, Uke Shelley, was a radiant spirit who " vainly 
 beat his luminous wings in a void." Only pity, — 
 gentle, kindly pity, — can be felt for the man who 
 without becoming unmanly, laid his inmost heart 
 bare in the sorrowful words of A Dream within a 
 Dream, 
 
 " You are not wrong who deem 
 
 That my days have been a dream: 
 
 Yet if hope has flown away 
 
 In a night, or in a day, 
 
 In a vision, or in none. 
 
 Is it therefore the less gone? 
 
 All that we see or seem 
 
 Is but a dream within a dream. 
 
 " I stand amid the roar 
 Of a surf-tormented shore, 
 And I hold within my hand 
 Grains of the golden sand — 
 How few! yet how they creep 
 Through my fingers to the deep, 
 While I weep — while I weep! 
 O God! can I not grasp 
 Them with tighter clasp? 
 O God! can I not save 
 One from the pitiless wave? 
 Is all that we see or seem 
 But a dreara within a dream? " 
 
IV 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 In passing from Poe to Emerson, we turn from 
 the most lyrical of American poets to one who, 
 from at least some points of view, was the least 
 articulate. Poe's thought, it must be conceded, 
 was, even at its richest, but vague and thin, yet 
 his voice was at no time other than flute-like; 
 Emerson's thought, on the contrary, was hardly 
 ever less than profound, yet he made such desperate 
 work with rhyme and rhythm, that not infre- 
 quently he fell short of giving his message clear 
 utterance. He indeed is often accused of having 
 had but a clouded vision himself, for there exist a 
 large number of readers who, however eager they 
 are to get at his secret, are forced to admit that 
 they can do no more than guess at the meaning 
 which lies concealed beneath many of the not 
 infrequently halting lines. Still, in spite of 
 Emerson's inabihty to express himself simply, 
 directly, and clearly in verse, he must not be too 
 hastily accused of obscurity. Before declaring 
 that Emerson, weighed in the balance, has been 
 found wanting, the reader would do well to take 
 the measure of his own powers. Only he who has 
 ears to hear, can receive Emerson's message; yet 
 that message no inconsiderable number of Usten- 
 ers have professed to hear and to understand. 
 Such men and women do not deny that Emerson 
 
48 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 was often unable to beat his music out, yet they 
 do not hesitate to insist that his eye was single, his 
 whole body full of light. 
 
 On the evidence just alleged, one may perhaps 
 allow the contention that Emerson's vision was 
 always clear at least to himself, and still hold 
 to the assertion that his writings are far from being 
 easy reading. Certainly his verse is often quite 
 obscure, and in general is far more difficult to 
 understand than his prose. True, his essays are 
 not meant, as Meredith, in speaking of a work of 
 his own, once said, " for Uttle people or for fools " ; 
 yet in a first reading they usually give up at least 
 the trend of their thought, whereas many of his 
 poems remain enigmatic for a considerable period 
 of time even to those whose souls are well attuned 
 to their teachings. Despite the difficulty of the 
 poems, however, their value is great. Indeed, it is 
 probably safe to say, that were every line of 
 Emerson's prose obliterated, his essential thought 
 would still be preserved in his poetry. In other 
 words, Emerson's essays are but Emerson's poems 
 cast in another mold — the prose is the alloyed ore; 
 the poetry, the pure gold. Valuable indeed, then, 
 are the poems; yet their value must be even more 
 highly estimated, — they lead us more directly 
 than do the essays to Emerson himself, more 
 immediately into his presence. In a certain 
 sense they . are autobiographical almost without 
 exception; they exhibit their author's personaUty 
 in a light that seldom, if ever, attends the essays; 
 they permit us to see his thought at work, they 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 49 
 
 show us his soul as it reached out experimentally 
 rather than finally to lay hold upon God and His 
 righteousness. For this reason, Emerson's poetry, 
 rather than his essays, is the ultimate source to 
 which we must go, if we would arrive at any ade- 
 quate understanding of his rehgion, his interpre- 
 tation of hfe, and his explanation of the inter- 
 relation between Nature, man, and God. 
 
 In an endeavor to reach any just estimate of 
 Emerson's faith and belief, we are confronted at 
 the outset with an almost insurmountable diffi- 
 culty, that of differentiating his religion from his 
 philosophy. We are sometimes told, it is true, 
 that Emerson never evolved a philosophy, for 
 taking into account even the whole collection of 
 his writings, we cannot discover there a systematic 
 body of general conceptions. Nevertheless, Emer- 
 son is at times as plainly philosophic as he is at 
 other times plainly rehgious. He is often objec- 
 tive, yet more often subjective; now he brings his 
 intellect to the fore, now his feelings. No doubt it 
 is quite impossible to determine beyond question 
 when Emerson's convictions are based upon 
 observation or reached by logical processes, and 
 when they are the outcome of intuition, or — shall 
 we say it? — inspiration, superinduced either by 
 meditation, or by contemplation of nature, or by 
 absorption into .what he himself called Universal 
 Mind. Impossible it may be to mark the separa- 
 tion, yet one feels, as one reads, that a poem hke 
 Initial, Dcemonic, and Celestial Love is an expression 
 of philosophic thought, and one like Threnody of 
 
50 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 reKgious feeKng. Such a statement as this, how- 
 ever, has its dangers, for certain writers upon 
 philosophy have not hesitated to assert their right 
 to all of Emerson, and many interested in rehgion 
 have made as large a counter-claim. He, there- 
 fore, who undertakes to disentangle the threads of 
 Emerson's philosophy and rehgion lays himself open 
 to attack. Indeed he is httle likely to please any- 
 body — perhaps least of all himself. Nevertheless, 
 bleak as the prospect is, the attempt must be made. 
 Early in his career as a writer, Emerson was 
 accused of being a pantheist, and, because a 
 pantheist, a disbeUever in the personality of God. 
 In the sense in which the charges were made, both 
 were false; in a larger sense, both were true. 
 Emerson was not a pantheist in the sense that he 
 held to the doctrine of there being no God other 
 than the combined forces and laws which are 
 manifested in the existing universe. He is panthe- 
 istic in the sense that he believed in an infinite 
 Essence, from which aU things emerge and into 
 which all things return. He could permit himself 
 to write in the poem entitled Pan, 
 
 " Being's tide 
 Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms 
 Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun; 
 Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of Giod 
 Throbs with an overmastering energy 
 Knowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie 
 White hollow shells upon the desert shore, 
 But not the less the eternal wave rolls on 
 To animate new miUions, and exhale 
 Races and planets, its enchanted foam." 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 51 
 
 Yet Emerson did not deny the personality of God, 
 as the result of any acceptancy of the pantheistic 
 teachings that the infinite Essence is without self- 
 consciousness and self-activity, and that the flow of 
 Nature is caused by an Agency which has no 
 cognizance of its own work except in so far as it 
 comes to self-reaUzation in the hfe of man. He 
 did, however, deny that personaUty in the ordinary 
 sense of the word; " foi:," as he wrote in his Journal 
 " the expression suggests too little rather than too 
 much, making one think of Him as having the 
 individuality of a great man such as the crowd 
 worships, instead of possessing a nature which 
 soars infinitely out of all definition, and dazzles all 
 inquest." Such a denial of the personality of God 
 is plainly nothing more than a rejection of a word 
 in order to keep the great positive fact behind it, — 
 an assertion adequately supported by the lines 
 called The Bohemian Hymn: 
 
 " In many forms we try 
 To utter God's infinity, 
 But the boundless hath no form, 
 And the Universal Friend 
 Doth as far transcend 
 An angel as a worm. 
 
 " The great Idea baffles wit. 
 Language falters under it. 
 It leaves the learned in the tech; 
 Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find 
 The measure of the eternal Mind 
 Nor hymn, nor prayer,' nor church." 
 
 Emerson was a block of stumbling in his day and 
 
52 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 generation, and has to some extent remained so 
 ever since, mainly because he was endeavoring — 
 perhaps unconsciously — to interpret quite liter- 
 ally the statement of the apostle that in God we 
 live and move and have our being. In the conclu- 
 sion at which he arrived, he found himself at 
 variance with the theist in one exceedingly impor- 
 tant point — the relation existing between the 
 Creator and His universe. The theist holds that 
 God in His personaUty transcends the world, which 
 He created out of nothing. If theism stopped with 
 this assertion, the doctrine would be but that form 
 of deism which maintains that the world has no 
 vital connection with its Maker, being whoUy 
 guided indeed by unalterable laws which He im- 
 posed at the time He performed the act of creation. 
 This opinion, it may be said in passing, is held 
 at the present day by the majority of scientists 
 who are not agnostics or atheists. But though 
 theism regards God as the Creator of all things, it 
 is not content to think of Him as an impassive 
 Spectator content to view from some distant van- 
 tage point the inevitable workings of unchangeable 
 commands. In place of such a cold and forbidding 
 conception, it advances the doctrine of immanence, 
 insisting that an inherent, indwelling God, having 
 infinite wisdom, compassion, and will, continues 
 to operate within the universe. With this rich 
 form of the doctrine, many pantheists would dis- 
 agree, but Emerson certainly accepted it sufl&ciently 
 to make it a part of his religion. Surely something 
 warmer than philosophy was strugghng for expres- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 53 
 
 sion when he lifted his voice in thanksgiving that 
 God had prevented his falling into the depths of 
 sin, and when he asserted that God, approached in 
 the spirit of true prayer, cannot withhold His 
 conquering aid. The conviction of his heart was 
 added to the conviction of his head when he gave 
 utterance to his belief that " man in the bush with 
 God may meet "; when he assured the Rhodora in 
 the woods that the selfsame power which brought 
 him there brought her too; and when he wrote, 
 in the lines headed Written at Rome, the message 
 exhorting a lonely soul to possess itself in patience, 
 
 " Wait then, sad friend, wait in majestic peace 
 The hour of heaven. Generously trust 
 "Thy fortune's web to the beneficent hand 
 That until now has put the world in fee 
 To thee. He watches for thee still. His love 
 Broods over thee, and as God Uves in heaven, 
 However long thou walkest solitary. 
 The hour of heaven shall come, the man appear." 
 
 With the theistic doctrine of the immanence 
 of a personal God in the universe, then, Emerson 
 must be regarded as being in full accord; but with 
 the often closely related behef that God is tran- 
 scendent in the sense of being in some way discon- 
 nected with the world, he could not agree. In his 
 earliest book, Emerson recorded his conviction that 
 Nature is a varying manifestation of one unvarying 
 spiritual, substance, the multiform phenomena of 
 one unchanging God. Whether or not, like the 
 extreme pantheists, he held that the sum total of 
 the universe is completely identical with God in 
 
54 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 His infinite entirety may or may not be disputed; 
 but from the opinion that all is God and God is one, 
 he seems never to have wavered. This belief is 
 the fundamental thought of the lines entitled 
 Xenophanes; it made possible the seeming para- 
 doxes in the poem Brahma; it found still another 
 expression in the second part of Woodnotes. 
 
 " Ever fresh the broad creation, 
 A divine improvisation. 
 From the heart of God proceeds, 
 A single Will, a million deeds. 
 
 " As the bee through the garden ranges. 
 From world to world the godhead changes; 
 As the sheep go feeding in the waste. 
 From form to form He maketh haste; 
 This vault which glows immense with light 
 Is the inn where be lodges for a night. 
 
 " Alike to him the better, the worse, — 
 The glowing angel, the outcast corse. 
 Thou meetest him by centuries. 
 And lo! he passes like the breeze; 
 Thou seek'st in globe the galaxy. 
 He hides in true transparency; 
 Thou askest in fountain and in fires. 
 He is the essence that inquires. 
 He is the axis of the star; 
 He is the sparkle of the spar; 
 He is the heart of every creature; 
 He is the meaning of each feature; 
 And his mind is the sky. 
 Than all it holds, more deep, more high." 
 
 Despite the teaching of the quotation just given, 
 readers of Emerson must not forget that in his 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 55 
 
 outlook upon Nature he had more than one point 
 of view. As an inhabitant of the physical world, 
 he never denied the reaUty of matter; as an inhabi- 
 tant of the spiritual world, he did deny that niatter 
 is an ultimate reality. In a considerable number 
 of poems, such as The Humble Bee, May-Day, The 
 Adirondacks, The Snow-Storm and Musketaquid, he 
 treated Nature as any other poet might treat it; 
 sometimes, it is true, highly personifying it and 
 richly endowing it with such Ught as never was on 
 sea or land, yet still regarding it as a fact, as 
 having actual existence apart from himself. In 
 this mood he could write in May-Day the exquisite 
 Unes, — 
 
 " I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 
 Stepping daily onward north 
 To greet staid ancient cavaliers 
 Filing single in stately train. 
 
 " I saw the Days deformed and low, 
 Short and bent by cold and snow; 
 The merry Spring threw wreaths on them. 
 Flower-wreaths gay with bud and beU; 
 Many a flower and many a gem, 
 They were refreshed by the smeU, 
 They shook the snow from hats and shoon, 
 They put their April garments on; 
 And those eternal forms. 
 Unhurt by a thousand storms, 
 Shot up to the height of the sky again." 
 
 When Emerson thus treats Nature, he is, in the 
 minds of many of his readers, at his best. Be 
 that as it may, he went not often to the woods, the 
 
56 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 mountains, or the sea, as goes the poet or the artist 
 who finds his chief satisfaction in beauty of form 
 or color or outline. Least of all did he invade the 
 valley and the forest in the spirit of the scientist 
 or the workman. A certain mild impatience speaks 
 in the lines occurring early in the poem entitled 
 Blight, — 
 
 " But these young scholars, who invade the hills, 
 Bold as the engineer who fells the wood. 
 And travelling often in the cut he makes. 
 Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, 
 And aU their botany is Latin names." 
 
 Such study had no attraction for him. Rather 
 did he go to Nature hke the philosopher of old, 
 who preferring things to names, — 
 
 " Were Unitarians of the united world, 
 And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, 
 They caught the footsteps of the same. 
 
 Nature, according to Emerson, is a channel 
 through which God comes to man; or better, since 
 she is no less than a manifestation of God, she is a 
 divine message daily spread before our eyes, hourly 
 spoken in our ears. Emerson arrived at this con- 
 clusion less by intellectual effort than by intuition, 
 yet his conviction was none the less certain that he 
 had heard the voice of God walking in the garden 
 in the cool of the day; that he had ^tood beside 
 Him in the mount, and had talked with Him face 
 to face; that he might at any time, in the forest, 
 or b^ the river, or on the shore of the sea, be rapt 
 into an ecstasy and behold in flower or tree, in tide 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 57 
 
 or wave, the true vision beatific. Thus to Emer- 
 son, Nature at times was very God — speaking 
 directly and distinctly to His children. Not all 
 men, however, he admitted in My Garden, are able 
 to receive the message; and even to the few who are, 
 the experience is intermittent and the power of 
 expression often limited. 
 
 " Ever the words of the gods resound; 
 But the porches of man's ear 
 Seldpm in this low life's round 
 Are unsealed, that he may hear. 
 
 " Wandering voices in the air 
 And murmms in the wold 
 Speak what I caimot declare. 
 Yet cannot aU withhold. 
 
 " But the meanings cleave to the lake, 
 Cannot be carried in book or urn; 
 Go thy ways now, come later back, \ 
 
 On waves and hedges still they burn." 
 
 In the broadest sense of the term Nature must 
 of course include man, nor did Emerson hesitate 
 to give the term its larger meaning. To him man 
 like Nature was to be regarded as a manifestation 
 of spirit. Of himself he did not hesitate to say 
 more than once, " I am part and particle of God," 
 nor did he mean less by that assertion than that 
 all men are in a true sense divine. One necessary 
 conclusion drawn from that beUef brought him 
 into clash with the Trinitarians, for although it 
 cannot be construed to deny the divinity of Christ, 
 it plainly disturbs an assumed balance by elevating 
 
58 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 every man to an essential equality with Him. 
 As in the matter of the personality of God, where 
 Emerson rejected the term to keep the idea, here 
 he rejected the idea to keep the term. The life of 
 the Nazarene he felt to be but the experience of 
 every man writ large. Christ, to use Emerson's 
 own expression in one poem, was sweet Mary's 
 boy, Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon; elsewhere he 
 was the Blessed Jew; once was He classified with 
 Dante, once with Caesar, and twice with Plato 
 and Shakespeare. In no case was he hailed as 
 greater or more god-like than they — certainly 
 never as the Son of God in any peculiar sense, never 
 as the exclusive Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
 Like those with whom Emerson associated Him in 
 thought. He had failed in some particular. He had 
 disappointed the yearning heart of mother Nature. 
 To her regret that not even in Christ had the per- 
 fect man yet appeared, Emerson gave voice in his 
 Song of Nature, — 
 
 " I travail in pain for him, 
 
 My creatures travail and wait; 
 His couriers come by squadrons, 
 He comes not to the gate. 
 
 " Twice I have moulded an image. 
 And thrice outstretched my hand, 
 Made one of day and one of night 
 And one of the salt sea-sand. 
 
 " One in a Judsean manger, 
 And one by Avon stream, 
 One over against the mouths of Nile, 
 And one in the Academe. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 59 
 
 " I moulded kings and saviors, 
 And bards o'er kings to rule; — 
 But fell the starry influence short, 
 The cup was never fuU." 
 
 It is interesting to discover at this point that 
 although Emerson rejected Christ as the Son of 
 God, in the Trinitarian sense, he accepted, perhaps 
 quite unconsciously to himself, the doctrine of the 
 third person of the triune God-head. The Over- 
 Soul of Emerson, as OHver Wendell Holmes long 
 ago pointed out in his biography of his friend, is 
 that aspect of Deity which is known to theology 
 as the Holy Spirit. It is universally diffused, yet 
 it dwells in the heart of man, leading him to all 
 truth. " Henceforth," wrote Emerson in an early 
 poem called Self -Reliance, 
 
 " I will be 
 Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God. 
 I find him in the bottom of my heart, 
 I hear continually his voice therein, 
 
 " The little needle always knows the North, 
 The little bird remembereth his note. 
 And this wise Seer within me never errs. 
 I never taught it what it teaches me; 
 I only follow, when I act aright." 
 
 Starting with the idea that there is one Universal 
 Mind common to all individual men, and that by 
 consequence whatever Plato has thought another 
 may think, and whatever a saint has felt, another 
 may feel, and whatever has befallen any man, 
 another may understand, Emerson advanced to 
 the ground that this Eternal Mind, this Over-Soul, 
 
60 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 as he called it; this Holy Spirit, as he did not call it 
 ■ — infinitely diffused, though still a unit, finds a dwell- 
 ing place in man. It tries all thiags, it instructs the 
 heart, it is The Informing Spirit, as Emerson wrote 
 in a poem to which he gave that very name : — 
 
 " There is no great and no small 
 To the Soul that maketh aU: 
 And where it cometh, aU things are; 
 And it cometh everywhere. 
 
 " I am the owner of the sphere, 
 Of the seven stars and the solar year, 
 Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, 
 Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain." 
 
 Thus Nature and the Soul, both manifestations 
 of God, were to Emerson the two sources of insight 
 into Divine Spirit. From without. Nature spoke 
 to him a various language in a far higher sense 
 than she ever spoke to Bryant; from within the 
 Soul unceasingly whispered to him the lesson of his 
 oneness with Eternal Mind. Confident in his 
 intuition that Nature and Soul are phenomena of 
 Spirit or — if the expression will now be allowed — 
 are God, he found the doctrine of IdeaUsm most 
 acceptable to his mind. In his lecture called The 
 Transcendentalist, he wrote: " The materialist 
 takes his departure from the external world and 
 esteems a man as one product of that. The ideaUst 
 takes his departure from his consciousness and 
 reckons the world an appearance. . . . His thought, 
 that is the Universe." In other words. Nature, 
 according to Emerson, exists only as there is mind 
 to appreciate it; every accompanying circum- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 61 
 
 stance may be present, but before anything is, 
 there must come into the field of these circum- 
 stances a mind to receive their impact, to recognize 
 them, and to relate them into phenomena. Thus 
 only does the eternal world have being. Nature, 
 therefore, although she may have come forth from 
 God, is inferior to thinking man who, since she 
 depends upon him for existence, is in a certain sense 
 her creator, thereby exhibiting, albeit in miniature, 
 characteristics of the great Original from which 
 both he and she sprang. In the poems no long 
 passage supports this doctrine, but the allusions 
 to the supremacy of thought are not few. The 
 eternality of Thought's holy light is insisted upon; 
 the poet is urged to speed the stars of Thought unto 
 their shining goals; the rocks of Nature, it is 
 pointed out, are the quarry whence Thought draws 
 its material to build its mansions; and where 
 Thought unlocks her mysteries, Emerson main- 
 tained, one walks in marble galleries and talks with 
 kings. A man, Emerson believed, — at least he 
 so expressed himseK in The Poet — might well give 
 all that he has for thought, 
 
 " For thought and not praise; 
 Thought is the wages 
 For which I sell days, 
 Will gladly sell ages 
 And willingly grow old, 
 Deaf, and dumb, and blind, and cold, 
 Melting matter into dreams. 
 Panoramas which I saw. 
 And whatever glows or seems 
 Into substance, into Law." 
 
62 Religion, in American Poetry 
 
 The idealism of Emerson led him to dismiss the 
 problem of Evil as one of no great importance. 
 Even when the grave, practical question of slavery- 
 was stirring the United States, he was late in 
 becoming aggressively interested. To him the 
 freeing of the bodies of men seemed but a slight 
 thing in comparison with the freeing of their minds. 
 One need not conclude from this assertion that 
 Emerson was indifferent to the subject, or that he 
 believed his friends and neighbors were making 
 mountains out of mole-hills. On the contrary, 
 he understood and approved of their motives and 
 work; but he plainly felt that, so far as he was con- 
 cerned, his work lay in another and more important 
 field. In consequence, the North was seething over 
 the matter of slavery in general, and Massachu- 
 setts was strongly agitated over the Fugitive Slave 
 Act in particular, long before Emerson came to see 
 that his duty called him to define his position. 
 
 Emerson had a mighty trust that all things work 
 together for good to them that love God, or, to use 
 his own term, to them that Kve in the Spirit. He 
 dared write as one of the fragments gathered under 
 the general title of Life, — 
 
 " No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low, 
 For God hath writ all dooms magnificent. 
 So guilt not traverses His tender wUl." 
 
 What matters Evil then? he could easily bring 
 himself to ask. To him privation, suffering, and 
 sorrow were but blessings in disguise, thrusting 
 men back upon the realization that they had been 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 63 
 
 made but little lower than the angels, — but a little 
 lower than God. As in Brahma, the red slayer 
 might think he had slain, the slain might think that 
 he had been slain; yet to Emerson as he recorded 
 in The Park, — 
 
 " Yet spake yon purple moimtain, 
 Yet said yon ancient wood, 
 That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, 
 Leads all souls to the Good." 
 
 The frequent occurrence of such thought and 
 reasoning in both the verse and the prose of 
 Emerson led John Morley to assert that if the 
 Concord poet saw Evil at all, he saw it through the 
 softening and illusive medium of generalized 
 phrases. He had, as some one else has said, " no 
 understanding of that heavy burden and impedi- 
 ment upon the soul which the churches call Sin, 
 and which, whatever name we call it by, is a very 
 real catastrophe in the moral nature of man." 
 Evil, he felt, was not an active principle, it was 
 merely the negation of Good. Death to him was 
 simply not Ufe; sickness, not health; grief, not 
 joy. He held that in time, as man advances in his 
 spiral upward course, the negations must all give 
 way to aflSrmations and Evil cease to be. When- 
 ever Emerson contemplated evil at all, he thought 
 of it as a discipUne which can work no final harm. 
 This discovery was the knowledge of his Uriel, 
 who speaking in the poem to which his own name 
 is given, pointed out that 
 
64 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " line in nature is not found; 
 Unit and universe are round; 
 In vain produced, all rays return; 
 Evil will bless, and ice will bum." 
 
 A school of philosophers with whom Emerson is 
 sometimes popularly associated holds that evil 
 wholly ceases to be, that the highest Good is reached 
 only when the soul, completely losing its identity, is 
 reabsorbed into God from whom it sprang and 
 from whom for a time it has been differentiated. 
 As a matter of fact Emerson was wholly averse to 
 this doctrine, firmly entrenching himself in a 
 beUef in the persistence of individuality. God, he 
 agreed, is self-reliant, self-sufficient; man is God in 
 miniature, therefore man, like God, is self-reUant, 
 self-sufficient. He spoke for himself no less than 
 for the old Greek philosopher in the unnamed 
 fragment assigned a place in the general collection 
 to which the title Life has been given, — 
 
 " The brave Empedocles, defying fools, 
 Pronounced the word that mortals hate to hear — 
 I am divine, I am not mortal made; 
 I am superior to my human weeds." 
 
 This certainty of one's divinity is the key to the 
 meaning of much that is obscure in Emerson — 
 clearly it unlocks the famous stanzas called The 
 Sphinx. In that poem, which is the despair of 
 many a reader, Emerson was merely maintaining 
 that he who forgets his superiority to his material 
 surroundings, lacks perspective, Hves only in the 
 particular, sees only difference. To such a man 
 the world addresses a question which he cannot 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 65 
 
 answer, for his mind is torn in pieces and van- 
 quished by distracting variety. But he who is no 
 longer timid or apologetic, or abject, he who dares 
 to say, " I think, I am," he, and not the world, is 
 the great unanswered question; to him time and 
 the things of time can give but a false reply. 
 Before such a defiant soul, 
 
 " Uprose the merry Sphinx, 
 
 And couched no more in stone; 
 She melted into purple cloud, 
 
 She silvered in the moon; 
 She spired into a yellow flame; 
 
 She flowered in blossom red; 
 She flowed into a foaming wave; 
 
 She stood Monadnoc's head. 
 
 " Through a thousand voices 
 
 Spoke the universal dame; 
 ' Who teUeth me one of my meanings 
 
 Is master of aU I am.' " 
 
 Clothed eternity is Emerson's own expression 
 for man — an expression which impUed for him 
 at least nothing less than personal immortality. 
 Presenting the same idea in other terms, he wrote 
 in his old age: " As I stand over the gloom and 
 deep of the Future, and consider earnestly what it 
 forebodes, I cannot dismiss my joyful auguries. 
 I will not and cannot see in it a fiction or a dream. 
 It is reahty arriving. It is to me an oracle that I 
 cannot bring myself to undervalue. It is the 
 temple of the highest." By these words Emerson 
 did not mean that he thought of the soul as trans- 
 lated after the agony of physical death to some 
 
66 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 distant region where it would find unending happi- 
 ness in a realm called Heaven. He rather believed 
 that the spirit, outliving the dissolution of the body, 
 would know an existence beyond the power of the 
 mind of mortal man to comprehend. As he looked 
 forth into that world, he had no such vision of the 
 reunion of souls as comforted Bryant, or was longed 
 for by Poe. As he had felt himself unable to 
 phrase a satisfactory definition of God, so he as 
 little felt himself able to write a circumstantial 
 definition of heaven. He had but Mttle sympathy 
 with the highly wrought picture in the Apocalypse 
 of Saint John; far truer to his mind were the words 
 of Saint Paul, " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
 neither have entered into the heart of man, the 
 things which God hath prepared for them that love 
 him." 
 
 And this faith was the more sure, because he had 
 reached it, not by the road of an intellectual process, 
 but by a path which led through the valley of the 
 shadow of death. Early in 1842 he lost his eldest 
 child, his first born son. After one outburst of 
 passionate grief, he became mute in his sorrow for a 
 time; yet at length he came to feel, as Tennyson 
 recalling the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam was 
 even at the same time feehng, that " for the unquiet 
 heart and brain a use in measured language lies." 
 In his Threnody, the American poet bewailed 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 67 
 
 " The hyacinthine boy, for whom 
 Morn well might break and April bloom, 
 The gracious boy, who did adorn 
 The world whereunto he was born. 
 And by his countenance repay 
 The favor of the loving Day." 
 
 In the earlier parts of the poem there are frequent 
 alternations between a mood marked by the long- 
 ing cry which bitter suffering forced from the 
 unhappy father's hps, and a calmer state of mind 
 which deep reflection brought him. Later, we 
 find that Emerson reached perfect poise in the 
 thought that whai is lost in God is in God-head 
 found. Never was he more confident than when 
 he wrote, 
 
 " Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 
 What rainbows teach, and sunsets show? 
 Verdict which accumulates 
 From lengthening scroll of human fates. 
 Voice of earth to earth returned, 
 Prayers of saints that inly burned — 
 Saying, What is excellent, 
 As God lives, is permanent; 
 Hearts are dust, hearts' love remains 
 Heart's love will meet thee again." 
 
 The philosophy and the religion of Emerson 
 received a great deal of adverse criticism during his 
 lifetime, nor have they yet ceased to be targets for 
 many a flying shaft. In all the years, however, 
 there has scarcely a single arrow of contempt or 
 ridicule or spite been aimed at Emerson himself. 
 More than once it happened when he was on his 
 lecturing tours that one who came to scoff remained, 
 
68 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 in a very literal sense, to pray. Ministers who felt 
 that they could not invite him to address their 
 people, openly spoke of him as an example to their 
 flock. The severest critic of Emerson the thinker, 
 had nothing but the highest praise for Emerson 
 the man. Never perhaps has there been another 
 case of a man whose teachings have been so sharply 
 assailed but who himself has been so generously 
 protected. Reverence is none too strong a word 
 to use in characterizing the attitude which many 
 held towards Emerson in his lifetime, nor is there 
 need to change that epithet today. A certain 
 dignity, a certain self-respect, a certain self-confi- 
 dence marked the man. Unconsciously, for though 
 self-reliant he was never egotistical, Emerson drew 
 his own portrait in the lines to which he gave the 
 name Character: — 
 
 " The sun set, but set not his hope: 
 Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
 Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
 Deeper and older seemed his eye; 
 And matched his sufferance sublime 
 The taciturnity of time. 
 He spoke, and words more soft than vain 
 Brought the Age of Gold again: 
 His actions won such reverence sweet 
 As hid all measure of the feat." 
 
 Surely it is not too much to say of such a man that 
 he was the noble embodiment of his own religion. 
 So thought those who knew him best, so thought 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes when, summing up the life 
 and conduct of his friend, he well said for aU of us: 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 69 
 
 " His creed was a brief one, but he carried it every- 
 where with him. In all he did, in all he said, and, 
 so far as outward signs could show, in all his 
 thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his hght and 
 guide; through all nature he looked up to nature's 
 God; and if he did not worship the man Christ 
 Jesus, as the churches of Christendom have done, 
 he followed His footsteps so nearly that our good 
 Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of him as more 
 Uke Christ than any man he had known." 
 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
 
 In making a study of the religious teachings of 
 American poets, one passes quite readily from 
 Emerson to Whittier. The two men were in 
 agreement upon a strikingly large number of 
 fundamental beliefs, despite the popular opinion 
 that a pantheist and a Quaker could have but few 
 spiritual ideas in common. The Over-Soul of 
 Emerson is hardly distinguishable from the Over- 
 Heart of Whittier; the voice-within of one is the 
 inner-light of the other; and Nature as a direct 
 utterance of God received equal recognition from 
 both. If Concord was taught by Emerson in 
 Each and All that " aU are needed by each one," 
 that " nothing is fair or good alone "; Amesbury 
 was as plainly told by Whittier in The Quaker of 
 Olden Time that " each man's life affects the spiri- 
 tual life of all, and in The Meeting that 
 
 " Dissevered from the suffering whole, 
 Love hath no power to save a soul." 
 
 The Sphinx, moreover, addressed her awful inquiry 
 into the meaning of life no less to Whittier than to 
 Emerson; and, although the latter found the solu- 
 tion to be that all is God, and the former that God 
 is good, the questioner was put to flight in either 
 case, for, as she herself acknowledged, whoever tells 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 71 
 
 one of her meanings is master of them all. Again, 
 if Emerson in a sense destroyed the divinity of 
 Christ by making all men equally, divine with 
 Jesus of Galilee, Whittier at least minimized the 
 importance of the historic life of the Nazarene, to 
 emphasize the fact that every true believer may 
 each day find within his own heart the gracious 
 Lord reborn. 
 
 Closely similar as the conclusion of Emerson and 
 Whittier were, however, the two poets made and 
 still make their appeal to entirely different ele- 
 ments in our human nature. We admire Emerson, 
 we love Whittier; we assent to the former, we feel 
 with the latter; we learn from the one that we are 
 the offspring of God, we know with the other that 
 we are all children of one Heavenly Father. In 
 other words, Emerson was the more philosophic, 
 Whittier the more reUgious. Far removed from 
 what may not unjustly be termed the indifferentism 
 of Poe and possibly of Whitman, the Quaker 
 writer, in his Christian mysticism passed beyond the 
 cahn intellectuality of Emerson and even trans- 
 cended the ethical nobility of Bryant, Longfellow, 
 Holmes, and Lowell, singers of faith and hope 
 though they undoubtedly were. Indeed, it may 
 well be asserted at this point that Whittier differed 
 from his fellow-poets in one exceedingly impor- 
 tant point: to them reUgion was a theory of life 
 variously apprehended, to him reUgion was life 
 itself. In a very true and pecuUar sense, Whittier 
 walked daily with his Master, even Christ, thus 
 renewing in the nineteenth century, the spiritual 
 
72 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 faith and worship of those enthusiasts who five 
 hundred years before had in all reverence called 
 themselves the Friends of God. 
 
 Born of Quaker parents, Whittier in childhood 
 adopted the faith of his fathers and held to it 
 throughout his Ufe. Exactly what that faith was, 
 it is perhaps impossible to define, for even Whittier 
 himself in The Preacher spoke of a representative 
 member of the Society of Friends as " barren of 
 rite and vague of creed." Still, an attentive reader 
 of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim and many allied 
 poems can discern that the Quakers were, as they 
 are now, easily distinguishable from their neighbors 
 by a marked simphcity of dress, manner, and 
 speech; by an earnest desire to five at peace with 
 all men; and by a policy of non-resistance, suffer 
 though they might from war or persecution. 
 From the same source one learns also that the 
 Friends asserting that all men are equal before God 
 dispense with an ordained ministry, since they 
 beUeve that no one should speak save as he is 
 prompted by thp Divine Spirit stirring within his 
 own soul. Such inspiration failing, the stillness of 
 their assembly often remains wholly unbroken, for 
 the Quaker holds the act of worship complete and 
 sufficient, though it takes no other form than 
 meditative communion with Eternal Mind. Such 
 was the form of worship of which Whittier wrote in 
 the poem last mentioned, — 
 
 " Lowly before the Unseen Presence knelt 
 Each waiting heart, till haply some one felt 
 On his moved Ups the seal of silence melt. 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 73 
 
 " Or, without spoken words, low breathings stole 
 Of a diviner life from soul to soul, 
 Baptizing in one tender thought the whole. 
 
 " For soul touched soul; the spiritual treasure-trove 
 Made all men equal, none could rise above 
 Nor sink below that level of God's love." 
 
 All things considered, it is perhaps safe to assume 
 that the essential difference between the Friends 
 and other religious bodies is found in the stress 
 placed by the Quakers upon the trustworthiness of 
 a compelling voice which speaks from within. 
 According to Whittier's unusually clear definition 
 of the triune God, this voice is no other than the 
 Holy Spirit. "God is one," he wrote, "just, 
 holy, merciful, eternal, and almighty, Creator, 
 Father of all things; Christ, the same eternal One, 
 manifested in our Humanity and in Time; and the 
 Holy Spirit, the same Christ, manifested within us, 
 the Divine Teacher, the Living Word, the Light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world." To the test of this divine Light the 
 Quaker subjected every act and thought of his 
 life. " Within himself " says Whittier in The 
 Pennsylvania Pilgrim " the Friend found the law of 
 right." To him, the unpardonable sin was no 
 other than the denial of the Word of God within 
 his own heart. Guided by that voice, therefore, 
 he worked out his salvation like the child spok,en 
 of in Help, 
 
74 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " still listening, through the noise of time and sense, 
 To the still whisper of the Inward Word; 
 Bitter in blame, sweet in approval heard, 
 Itself its own confirming evidence: 
 To health of soul a voice to cheer and please, 
 To guilt the wrath of the Eumenides." 
 
 Happy, thrice happy indeed were souls like William 
 Forster who " walked the dark world in the mild, 
 still guidance of the Light " or hke Barclay of Ury 
 whose " inward ear over the rabble's laughter 
 angel whisperings could hear," or Hke Francis 
 Pastorius, the Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 
 
 " Through whose veiled, mystic faith the Inward light. 
 Steady and stiU, an easy brightness, shone. 
 Transfiguring all things in its radiance white." 
 
 Settled conviction that the Inner Light was 
 denied to no man, or, in other words, that at no 
 period and in no nation has God left himself with- 
 out witnesses, the Quaker, despite the narrowness 
 of his creed when he thought only of himself, was 
 as broad as the whole earth in his charity when he 
 turned to look upon his fellow-men. To him 
 spiritual democracy was a very real fact indeed, and 
 every man therefore was free to worship as the 
 hght within himself revealed. In Whittier espe- 
 cially did this Quaker behef in the equaUty of all 
 men before God reach full flower. Assuming, 
 as he himself once said, that the most fitting 
 expression for the Inner Light, the root idea of 
 Quakerism, may be found in the word Immanuel' 
 God with us, he shrank from asserting, much more 
 from beUeving, that all truth is in the possession of 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 75 
 
 one age, nation, or sect. His view was wider. 
 He saw, as he wrote in The Quaker Alumni, that — 
 
 " The Word which the reason of Plato discerned; 
 The Truth, as whose symbol the Mithra-fire burned; 
 The soul of the world which the Stoic but guessed, 
 In the Light Universal, the Quaker confessed! " 
 
 Thus regarding all men, whenever and wherever 
 born, as the children of one loving Father and as 
 having some share of the mystic Word, the Holy- 
 Ghost, the Comforter, Whittier looked for the 
 salvation of the Jew, the barbarian, and the 
 heretic; and spoke with no grudging respect of the 
 faith of the Romanist, the Churchman, and the 
 Calvinist. True, he admitted the possibility of 
 the perpetual loss of the soul that persistently 
 turns away from God; but theological argmnent 
 had little attraction for him, and " his human 
 hands," he said, more than once, " were weak to 
 hold the iron-bound creeds." To those who urged 
 it upon him as a duty to insist upon the justice and 
 the wrath of God, he could only reply that whoever 
 hears and obeys the Inner Voice may without ques- 
 tion trust himself to the Divine Love of the Eternal 
 Goodness. 
 
 BeUef in the possibility of a mystic communion 
 with the Holy Spirit did not end for Whittier in the 
 establishment of a theoretical democracy of souls. 
 His religion if anything at aU, was intensely practi- 
 cal. Sunday might appropriately be regarded 
 as a time for special worship, but activity in 
 the service of God was not to be forgotten on 
 
76 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 other days of the week. One might not sit too 
 hastily in judgment upon his fellow-men, for their 
 conduct might have been commanded by the voice 
 of the Spirit; but when a man had obviously per- 
 mitted his own passions or desires to deafen the 
 ear of his soul, then must he be told his error in no 
 uncertain terms. One's country was to be loved, 
 the franchise was to be looked upon with respect, 
 but a nation might fall into sin and deserve the 
 castigation of any man whose own hands were 
 clean, whose own heart was pure. Not willingly 
 did Whittier take up his great work of reform; 
 but whither the monitions of the spirit commanded, 
 he dared not refuse to walk. In his young man- 
 hood he saw his country fallen upon evil ways. 
 His duty was clear before him and that duty he 
 unhesitatingly performed. Wherever he saw an 
 aiUng spot, he placed his finger upon it; what- 
 ever worthy cause needed his support, he helped. 
 His voice was heard in season and out of season; 
 he made no distinction on account of race, color, 
 or previous condition of servitude; he was no 
 respecter of persons. 
 
 In A Summons he uttered his indignation at the 
 adoption of Pinckney's Resolutions in the House of 
 Representatives; in To a Southern Statesman, he 
 expressed his disgust at the two-faced policy of 
 Calhoun; and in Ichabod he sternly rebuked so 
 great a man as Webster for his notorious Seventh 
 of March speech. Societies of one kind and 
 another, associations of clergymen, and bodies of 
 legislature heard his voice. If that voice was at 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 77 
 
 times as of one crying in the wilderness, it none the 
 less firmly called to repentance, and gave warning 
 that the time was at hand for a thorough cleansing 
 of the threshing floor. He deplored in retrospect 
 the persecution during colonial times of men and 
 women upon the charge of witchcraft or of member- 
 ship in some unpopular religious sect; he could 
 find no place for patience with the injustice that 
 had been measured out to the Indian; and he 
 bitterly denounced the inhuman ill-treatment that 
 in his own day was being visited upon the negro. 
 Capital punishment he looked upon as judicia;l 
 murder; imprisonment of any sane man other 
 than a criminal, as an infringement of the God- 
 given right of freedom; and slavery as quite the 
 most heinous of social crimes. He would have no 
 man bound in any way save at the command of 
 the Inner Light of the man himself; but woe unto 
 the man who having ears to hear heard not the 
 voice of the Spirit, or hearing did not openly take 
 his stand for justice and truth. 
 
 When slavery came to an end, and the many 
 attendant evils were quelled, Whittier was at 
 liberty to lay aside his active work of pubUc reform. 
 He could then turn from the composition of such 
 verses as Stanzas for the Times, Clerical Oppressors, 
 and Official Piety, to devote himself once more to 
 the writing of songs much more congenial to his 
 heart. That indignation frequently makes very 
 good verses indeed, Thomas Carlyle long ago 
 pointed out, yet one can hardly assert that Whit- 
 tier's Anti-Slavery Poems or his /Songs of Labor and 
 
78 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Reform contain much work of real poetic value. 
 Those verses were written for a particular purpose, 
 and they nobly served that purpose; but save as 
 an influence in history, they need not now be 
 remembered. That many were the practical 
 expression of Wtittier's deep rehgious feeling is 
 evident, yet hardly a line of them can be quoted in 
 this day and generation to strengthen the feeble 
 kneeS', to comfort the sin-sick soul, or to bind up the 
 broken-hearted. For such purposes, recourse must 
 rather be had to work which, although it makes no 
 strong appeal to the writer of history, is none the 
 less of much importance to any man who finds an 
 interest in religious thought. 
 
 Things spiritual^ it is popularly assumed, have 
 their ultimate source in the Bible. Whittier 
 strongly dissented frorp. this opinion, maintaining 
 that the only possible final authority is the living 
 omnipresent spirit of God. " The Scriptures," he 
 once wrote, " are a rule, not the rule of faith and 
 practice . . . the reason of our obedience to which, 
 is mainly that we find in them the eternal precepts 
 of the Divine Spirit declared and repeated, to which 
 our conscience bears witness. . . . We believe in 
 the Scriptures because they repeat the warnings 
 and admonitions and promises of the indwelling 
 Light and Truth, because we find the law and 
 prophets in our own souls." In other words, 
 Whittier, like his own colonial hero Pastorius, 
 insisted upon interpreting his Bible by the Inward 
 Light. Whatever he found there, must, to gain 
 Ins assent^ have in some way squared itself to the 
 
John Geeenleaf Whittier 79 
 
 standard of that inward monitor. That the 
 Scriptures as a whole did so square themselves in 
 Whittier's mind, his poetry repeatedly bears wit- 
 ness. For the most part he seems to have accepted 
 quite literally whatever he read in Holy Writ. 
 The value which he placed upon the Scriptures is no 
 doubt expressed in The Vavdois Teacher by the 
 peddlar who spoke of them as — * 
 
 " A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue shall not 
 decay, 
 Whose Ught shall be as a spell to thee and a blessing on thy 
 way! " 
 
 Certainly Whittier knew the contents of his Bible 
 as few other poets in modern times have known it. 
 The most obscure names and incidents in Hebrew 
 history came readily to his mind; allusions to men 
 and places of sacred Palestine abound in his writ- 
 ings, and his very diction betrays the fact thalt the 
 Bible for years must have been his daily compan- 
 ion. How thoroughly Whittier made the events 
 related in the Scriptures a part of his mental 
 equipment, a single extract from Mogg Megone, 
 although by no means an isolated example, suffi- 
 ciently shows: — 
 
 " Came, softly blending, on my ear 
 With the low tones I loved to hear : 
 
 Tales of the pure, the good, the wise, 
 The holy men and maids of old. 
 In the all-sacred pages told; 
 Of Rachel, stooped at Haran's fountains. 
 
 Amid her father's thirsty flock. 
 Beautiful to her kinsman seeming 
 As the bright angels of his dreaming, 
 
80 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 On Padan-aran's holy rock; 
 Of gentle Ruth, and her who kept 
 
 Her awful vigil on the mountains, 
 By Israel's virgin daughters wept; 
 Of Miriam, with her maidens, singing 
 
 The song for grateful Israel meet, 
 While every crimson wave was bringing 
 
 The spoils of Egypt at her feet; 
 Of her, Samaria's humble daughter. 
 
 Who paused to hear, beside her well. 
 
 Lessons of love and truth, which fell 
 Softly as Shiloh's flowing water; 
 
 And saw, beneath his pilgrim guise, 
 The Promised One, so long foretold 
 By holy seer and bard of old. 
 
 Revealed before her wondering eyes! " 
 
 To Whittier the Bible, well as he knew it, much 
 as he loved it, was not in itself a revelation of God, 
 rather was it the record of such a revelation. 
 Viewed in that light, it needs at times much 
 explanation; and this explanation Whittier found 
 not in theological commentary nor in scholarly 
 treatise, but in what he saw with his eyes and heard 
 with his ears. In A Sabbath Scene, he went so 
 far as to say, " I heard the written word inter- 
 preted by nature " and in Trinitas he recorded the 
 story of an incident upon the street which helped 
 him to solve the riddle of how Three are One and 
 One is Three. Leaving his door one morning with 
 that question upon his lips, he observed first of all 
 as he went on his way that sun, air, and rain are 
 bestowed ahke upon the good and the evil, the foul 
 and the fair; later in the day he saw by chance a 
 stainless woman pause to speak a word of help and 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 81 
 
 comfort to a fallen sister of the streets; and still 
 later, as he passed a haunt of sin, his soul prompted 
 the thought, how shall heaven be carried to these 
 lost souls? Returning homeward, his morning's 
 question still unanswered, he strove to find the 
 solution in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, 
 and Calvin, but none yielded him a satisfactory 
 reply. Closing his books, his desire unappeased, 
 he suddenly found the mystery become clear; 
 a rebuking whisper spoke within his soul, 
 
 " O blind of sight, of faith how small! 
 Father, and Son, and Holy Call; 
 This day thou hast denied them all! 
 
 " Revealed in love and sacrifice, 
 The Holiest passed before thine eyes, 
 One and the same, in threefold guise, 
 
 " The equal Father in rain and sun, 
 His Christ in the good to evil done, 
 His Voice in thy sold; — and the Three are One! " 
 
 Like the Hebrew writers Whittier found his chief 
 proof of God in Nature. With such passages from 
 the Scriptures as call attention to the fact that the 
 young lions seek their meat from God, that the 
 earth trembles at the presence of the Lord, 
 and that the firmament showeth His handiwork, 
 one need not hesitate to compare a noticeably 
 large number of quotations from the Quaker poet. 
 Againr, beside that Psalm which summons every 
 created thing to praise the name of the Lord, one 
 may properly place the early Unes of the poem 
 entitled, — The Worship of Nature, 
 
82 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " The harp at Nature's advent strung 
 Has never ceased to play; 
 The song the stars of morning sung 
 Has never died away. 
 
 " And prayer is made, and praise is given, 
 By all things near and far; 
 The ocean looketh up to heaven 
 And mirrors every star." 
 
 Plainly Nature at all times spoke to Wliittier of 
 God. Convinced that she never hints in vain, nor 
 prophesies amiss, he sought and found the spiritual 
 fact behind her every sign and symbol. In redden- 
 ing dawn, in warm noon-lights, in sunset gold, he 
 watched God's angels come and go; on sky and 
 mountain wall he saw the Almighty's pictures 
 hang; the sky to him was the hollow of God's 
 hand, the lake the mirror of His love; the stars 
 His teachers; the hills, the streams, the woods, 
 His witnesses. In winter, in spring, in summer, 
 turn where he would, the poet saw God about 
 him, " and when," as he wrote in The Pennsylvania 
 Pilgrim) 
 
 " And when the miracle of autumn came, 
 And all the woods with many colored flame 
 Of splendor, making summer's greenness tame, 
 
 " Burned, unconsumed, a voice without a sound 
 Spake to him from each kindled bush around, 
 And made the strange, new landscape holy groimd!" 
 
 Although Nature daily led Whittier into direct 
 communion with God, the poet was never able to 
 accept the doctrines which with Emerson looked 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 83 
 
 at least in the direction of pantheism. The 
 Quaker held to the theistic principle that the 
 external world, although God is undoubtedly 
 immanent within it, is, Uke man, something apart 
 from Divine Personality. Nevertheless, not even 
 at rare intervals, did Whittier fall into the colder, 
 though not necessarily less devout attitude of the 
 scientist. He cared httle for the principles dis- 
 covered or the theories formulated by the physicist 
 and the chemist; he preferred to see Nature 
 undissected, unlabelled, unanalyzed, untabulated. 
 A devoted friend of Agassiz, he could write, " I 
 have no fear of anything that science finds in search- 
 ing through material things." Unhesitatingly ac- 
 cepting the geologist's discoveries with many of 
 their impUcations, he could, after all had been said, 
 fall back upon the belief that " the sandstone none 
 the less was woven with threads of rain from God's 
 design." To him, the Divine Creator was ever at 
 work in his world. The yearly repetition of spring 
 and summer, autumn and winter, the regular suc- 
 cession of flowers and fruit and seed, did not by 
 their familiarity make the mysterious power of 
 God seem to him the less wondrous and sublime. 
 The miracle of life remained, the miracle of grass 
 and bush and tree. The scientist might point out 
 a relation of cause and effect, might enunciate a 
 law; but the statement, the conclusion was no 
 more than evidence that man had become possessed 
 of a little deeper insight into the methods of the 
 Maker and Preserver of the world. To Whittier 
 whatever science had to say, the changes in Nature 
 
84 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 were no less miraculous than they were on that first 
 day of creation when the spirit of God moved upon 
 the face of the waters. 
 
 Much, however, as Whittier loved Nature, deep 
 as were the lessons which she taught him, he could 
 not regard her as the final teacher of truth. He 
 might point out in the Knes To Avis Keene that 
 Nature in every one of her moods utters some 
 message of divinity, he might remark in A Summer 
 Pilgrimage that our common earth is holy ground, 
 and that all things which we look upon are but 
 shadows of God's reahties; yet he saw clearly that 
 Nature by herself can give no sufficient solution to 
 the mystery which surrounds us. To one who 
 turns unsatisfied from the creeds and the cere- 
 monials of the churches, and hopes to find truth 
 and peace and rest in communion with Nature, 
 Whittier felt compelled to utter a word of warning. 
 " True," he wrote in a poem sent with a copy of 
 Woolman's Journal, — 
 
 " True, to thee an answer cometh 
 From the earth and from the sky. 
 And to thee the hills and waters 
 And the stars reply. 
 
 " But a soul-sufficing answer 
 Hath no outward origin; 
 More than Nature's many voices 
 May be heard within." 
 
 Man, Whittier ever felt, man to whom the Holy 
 Spirit speaks directly, is far more than his abode, 
 his inward life far more than the raiment in which 
 Nature clothes herself. Much, the poet admitted, 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 85 
 
 had been taught him by the warm sky, the 
 sundown-tinted hill, the forest, and the lake; but 
 his soul reacted upon the knowledge thus obtained 
 and he learned, as the hero of The Branded Hand 
 had learned, 
 
 " A higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know; 
 God's stars and silence taught him, as His angels only can, 
 That the one sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is 
 Man! " 
 
 Whittier of course understood the point of view 
 of those scientists and philosophers who maintain 
 that mankind is a part of Nature, but he could never 
 bring himself to classify humanity with sticks and 
 stones or with the beasts that perish. He was 
 ready to assume, as has already been pointed out, 
 that man, like Nature, is something apart from 
 Divine Personality but he plainly held that man- 
 kind transcends Nature in a way not unanalogous 
 to that in which mankind is itself transcended by 
 God. Man, he did not forget, can lay his hand 
 upon all the forces of Nature and bend them to his 
 will, can harness the wild beast and make him 
 tame, can even perversely use his God-like powers 
 to place his fellowman beneath the yoke. En- 
 dowed with free-will he can make his own choice 
 between good and evil; self-conscious, self-deter- 
 mining, he is endowed with personaUty as is no 
 other being save God alone. Misusing his power, 
 he sins; but never, Whittier insisted, can he wholly 
 lose his God-like character. The poet in his out- 
 look here may well be compared with his friend 
 
86 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Joseph Sturge who, as Whittier wrote in In Remem- 
 brance, — 
 
 " in the vilest saw 
 Some sacred crypt or altar of a temple 
 
 StiU vocal with God's law; 
 And heard with tender ear the spirit sighing 
 
 As from its prison cell, 
 Praying for pity, like the mournful crying 
 Of Jonah out of hell." 
 
 Thus regarded, Man, no less than Nature taught 
 Whittier lessons of God. Beneath all the sorrow, 
 evil, and sin of this world, he penetrated to the 
 infinite worth of man; and testing his conclusions 
 by the still small voice within, he found himself, 
 as in The Hermit of the Thebaid, near to the feet of 
 
 God, 
 
 " For man the Kving temple is: 
 The mercy-seat and cherubim, 
 And all the holy mysteries, 
 He bears with him." 
 
 Among men Whittier found Jesus of Nazareth, 
 a man exceeding every man; but though a man, 
 yet not the less a being through whom God 
 uniquely and miraculously made Himself manifest — 
 a new revelation, as he wrote in Our Master, of the 
 Eternal in time — humanity clothed in the bright- 
 ness of the Father, — 
 
 " Most human and yet most divine, 
 The flower of man and Gtod." 
 
 Against the recorded events in the three and thirty 
 years of that mysterious life in Galilee, Whittier 
 never raised a doubt. The immaculate birth, the 
 miracles at Cana, in Samaria, and at Bethany; 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 87 
 
 the resurrection, the appearance to the twelve, 
 and the ascension into heaven, all unquestioned, 
 have their place in the poetry of Whittier. Very 
 real indeed to him were all those wondrous events, 
 yet not so real nor so wonderful that in his con- 
 templation of them he failed to see the Christ who 
 walked beside him day by day. The Christ of 
 history he knew, if we base our conclusions upon 
 a further study of the poem last mentioned, is 
 no more upon earth, 
 
 " He Cometh not a king to reign; 
 The world's long hope is dim; 
 The weary centuries watch in vain 
 The clouds of Heaven for Him. 
 
 " Nor holy bread, nor blood of grape, 
 His Uneaments restore 
 Of Him we know in outward shape 
 And in the flesh no more." 
 
 Nevertheless, Whittier firmly believed that this 
 Christ though dead yet speaketh; though crucified, 
 yet liveth. 
 
 " For warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
 A present help is He; 
 And faith has still its OUvet 
 And love its Gahlee. 
 
 " The healing of His seamless dress 
 Is by our beds of pain; 
 We touch him in life's throng and press. 
 And we are whole again." 
 
 The poet of course could not say with the beloved 
 disciple, " that which we have heard, which we 
 have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
 
88 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 upon, and our hands h^ve handled, of the Word of 
 life, declare we unto you," but he could and did 
 speak out of the fullness of an intimate daily 
 companionship with Him in the Spirit. BeUev- 
 ing, as he wrote in The Men of Old " that the 
 church, sceptic at heart, had read with but slow 
 and reluctant eye the lessons of its Head," Whittier 
 thought not of the Holy Land, but of the daily need 
 as redolent of Him. Christ's Uving presence was in 
 the bound and bleeding slave; was scourged and 
 crucified in the blameless poor, was revealed in 
 every kind and loving act. " The Voice," the 
 poet said, " that spoke in Nazareth still speaks, the 
 sound thereof hath never died. In one's suffering 
 brother the Lord is found and not descending from 
 the clouds." Not the dead but the living Christ 
 was the mighty fact in Whittier's religious belief. 
 His spirit, the poet insisted in Our Master, as 
 Eternal Love remains. 
 
 " And not for signs in heaven above 
 Or earth below they look, 
 Who know with John His smile of love. 
 With Peter His rebuke. 
 
 " We may not climb the heavenly steeps 
 To bring the Lord Christ down: 
 In vain we search the lowest deeps, 
 For Him no depths can drown. 
 
 " In joy of inward peace, or sense 
 Of sorrow over sin, 
 He is His own best evidence, 
 His witness is within." 
 
 Although the stanzas just quoted make direct 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 89 
 
 mention of Christ, they end with a statement which 
 immediately recalls to the reader's mind Whittier's 
 conception of the Holy Ghost as the Inner Light. 
 The poet's thought, indeed, wherever it started, 
 by whatever path it travelled, arrived eventually 
 at that one goal, at that one central fact. It 
 would be misleading, no doubt, to assert that 
 Whittier had a greater trust in the Third Person of 
 the Trinity than he had in the First, and it would 
 certainly be an error to maintain that he in any 
 way minimized the saying of Jesus, " No man 
 Cometh to the Father but by me." Still it must 
 be admitted that his confidence in the Inner Light 
 was supreme. The fact is, Whittier accepted quite 
 literally and put to very practical use the promise 
 which Jesus made to His disciples in His last con- 
 ference with them before His crucifixion: " I will 
 pray the Father and He shall give you another 
 Comforter that he may abide with you forever, 
 even the Spirit of truth. . . . And the Comforter, 
 which is the Holy Ghost, he shall be in you, and 
 shall teach you all things, . . . and will guide you 
 into all truth." Never doubting that this promise 
 had been completely fulfilled for those to whom it 
 was immediately made, and was indeed still being 
 fulfilled for their successors in his own time, 
 Whittier brought to the Voice within for its ap- 
 proval or disapproval every conclusion which he 
 drew from an attentive reading of the Bible, from 
 a close observation of Nature, from an intimate 
 knowledge of man, and from a devout contempla- 
 tion of the life and work of Christ as the Redeemer 
 
90 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 of the World. Of the conclusions thus tested and 
 thus divinely sanctioned there take prominent 
 places: the goodness of God, the abiding power of 
 faith and love; and the steadfast hope of im- 
 mortahty. 
 
 In the mind of Whittier, God seems rarely, if 
 ever, to have been associated with any image of 
 terror, indignation, or wrath. He is never pic- 
 tured by the poet as a God of anger wreaking ven- 
 geance upon a wicked and perverse generation, 
 but always as a God of tenderness, mercy, and pity. 
 Though Whittier saw that pain and grief must 
 have their place in the hfe of man, that the daily 
 wine-press must be trod, he firmly held that the 
 All-knowing Father careth for His children in their 
 need. Chasten and rebuke them He may for their 
 waywardness and sin, yet His ear is ever open to 
 their cries. In His good time and in His own best 
 way. He hears and answers all their prayers. 
 " God is," the poet wrote, " and aU is well." He 
 is, in the words of the poem At Everdide, 
 
 " Eternal Good -which overlies 
 The sorrow of the world, Love which outlives 
 All sin and wrong, Compassion which forgives 
 To the uttermost, and Justice whose clear eyes 
 Through lapse and failure look to the intent^ 
 And judge our frailty by the life we meant." 
 
 This sense of loving Fatherhood and this child- 
 hke trust in the Infinite Goodness may stand as a 
 summary of Whittier's abiding faith in God. 
 Again and again does the thought find expression 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 91 
 
 in the poems. In Italy he dwells upon the right- 
 eousness of God whereby the children of the light 
 shall tread at last the darkness under foot; in the 
 lines called In Quest, he is confident that the 
 riddle of the world is clear to thdse who feel that 
 God is good; in The Waiting he asserts that let 
 come what may, be loss or gain our lot) God will 
 somehow, sometime, somewhere make the balance 
 good. Turn the pages of Whittier's poetry as one 
 will, this insistence upon the goodness of God is 
 everyT?here. It is in The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 
 in The Last Walk in Autumn, in Cassandra South- 
 vnch, in Rabbi Ishmael, in The Shadow and the 
 Light. It is the animating impulse of whole collec- 
 tions of poems gathered under some spiritual 
 headings. It may indeed be regarded as a funda- 
 mental thought of. the Quaker, port's Jife. Cer- 
 tainly it. is the informing thought which made 
 possible the simple perfection of that intensely 
 personal poem The Eternal Goodness. There Whit- 
 tier reiterated his fixed trust that God is good. 
 " I know not of His hate," he wrote, " I know 
 only His goodness and His love. 
 
 " I know not what the futiire hath 
 Of marvel or smprise, 
 Assured alone that Uf e and death 
 His mercy underhes. 
 
 " And so beside the Silent Sea 
 I wait the muffled oar; 
 No harm from Him can come to me 
 On ocean or on shore. 
 
92 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " I know not where His islands lift 
 Their fronded palms in air; 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 Beyond His love and care.'' 
 
 So confident was Whittier of the goodness of 
 God, so willing to lean his human heart upon the 
 pitying bosom of his Lord, he felt no fear, no terror 
 at the thought of being called before the judgment 
 seat. To God, it was Whittier's behef, all His 
 creatures appear as they really are; and He seeth 
 not as man seeth; His way is not our way, a thought 
 found in so early a poem as Funeral Tree of the 
 Sokokis, and again much later in The Pressed 
 Gentian. Both are here laid under contribution: — 
 
 " And Nature's God to whom alone 
 The secret of the heart is known, — 
 
 " Not with our partial eye shall scan, 
 Not with our pride and scorn will ban. 
 
 " Man judges from a partial view, 
 Man never yet his brother knew; 
 The Eternal Eye that sees the whole 
 May better read the darkened soul, 
 And find, to outward sense denied, 
 The flower upon its inmost side! " 
 
 Assured by the Spirit of this onmiscience in his 
 Heavenly Father, assured likewise that beyond 
 that Father's judgment. His mercy would endure, 
 Whittier felt that he well might pray with the 
 psalmist of old, " Thy hand not man's on mine be 
 laid." Man, the poet saw, may be hate and earth 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 93 
 
 may frown below, yet no less he was sure that 
 Heaven weeps on high and God is always love. 
 
 Whittier fully assured of the infinite me^cy of 
 God, dared hope at times in every soul's ultimate 
 salvation. " Can Heaven itself be Heaven," he 
 asked, " and look unmoved on Hell? " have souls 
 redeemed no share in the sorrow of God over the 
 wayward and the lost? has faith no work to do, 
 and love no prayer to make as the cries of those in 
 torment assail the gates of Heaven and sadden 
 those within? Rejecting the harsh doctrine of old 
 time that the sufferings of the wicked in l^eir 
 agony and pain sweeten and increase the joys of 
 those who are at peace, he pictures in The Two 
 Angels, the God of Light as sending forth from the 
 heavenly host the two nearest of his attendants. 
 Pity, the most tender, anid Love, the most dear, to 
 bear a message of consolation and hope to the souls 
 that fill the under realm. 
 
 " The way was strange, the flight was long; at last the angels 
 came 
 Where swung the lost and nether world; red-wrapped in 
 rayless flame. 
 
 " There Pity, shuddering, wept; but Love, with faith too 
 strong for fear, 
 Took heart from God's ahnightiness and smiled a smile of 
 cheer. 
 
 " And lo! that tear of Pity quenched the flame whereon it 
 feU, 
 And, with the sunshine of that smile, hope entered into 
 HeU! " 
 
94 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Convinced, however, as Whittier was, of the 
 goodness, the gentleness, the tenderness of God, 
 he knew the nature of man too well to deny the 
 possibility of the complete loss of the soul which 
 persistently stops its ears to the gracious pleading 
 of the Lord. " I may beUeve," he once wrote in 
 a letter, " that the Divine Love and Compassion 
 follow us in all worlds and that the Heavenly 
 Father will do the best that is possible for every 
 creature He has made; but beUeving that man is 
 endowed with free will and that therefore he 
 has within his own hand the making of his life both 
 here and hereafter, I can but feel at times that 
 Heaven beholding man's unthankfulness may 
 at last wholly lose Its patience and Its love." 
 Thus beheving, Whittier occasionally found the 
 thought obtruding itself upon him that, as a poet, 
 a teacher of men, a bearer of a message, he had 
 perhaps too persistently dwelt upon the kindly 
 pity of the everlasting goodness. At least once, 
 in The Answer, he undertook to sound the note of 
 warning to presumptuous souls. To those who 
 say that the present shall be theirs alone a^d 
 duty may be laid aside until a more convenient 
 season, he uttered the stern rebuke " Tomorrow is 
 with God alone, and man hath but to-day." Still 
 Whittier never represented God as turning away 
 from perverse and willful man; rather he threw 
 the responsibihty of loss upon man himself. It 
 rests with him having ears to hear, whether he will 
 obey the voice of the Spirit. 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 95 
 
 " Forever round the Mercy-seat 
 
 The guiding lights of Love shall burn; 
 But what if, habit-bound, thy feet 
 Shall lack the will to turn? 
 
 " Say not, thy fond, vain heart within. 
 The Father's arm shall stiU be wide. 
 When from these pleasant ways of sin 
 Thou turn'st at eventide. 
 
 " Though Grod be good, and free be heaven, 
 No force divine can love compel; 
 And, though the song of sins forgiven 
 May sound through lowest hell, 
 
 " The sweet persuasion of His voice 
 Respects thy sanctity of will. 
 He giveth day: thou hast thy choice 
 To walk in darkness still." 
 
 Man, then, according to Whittier, has a duty to 
 perform, and leaving it undone, he may commit the 
 sin which is even unto death. If he would save his 
 soul ahve, if he would escape as the bird out of the 
 snare of the fowler, he must be alert to every com- 
 mand of God, he must foUow Truth wherever it 
 may lead, he must utter the message divin'ely 
 placed upon his lips. Be the cost what it may, 
 " simple duty," said Whittier, " has no place 
 for fear, since our task is truly accomplished 
 only when we work in unison with God's great 
 thought and thus hasten on the day when God and 
 man shall speak as one." But man, the poet 
 saw and once recorded in The Reward, is frail and 
 prone to sin. 
 
96 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Alas! the evil which we fain would shun 
 We do, and leave the wished-for good undone: 
 
 Our strength to-day 
 Is but to-morrow's weakness, prone to fall; 
 Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all 
 Are we alway. 
 
 " Who bears no trace of passion's evil force? 
 Who shuns thy sting, O terrible Remorse? 
 
 Who does not cast 
 On the thronged pages of his memory's book, 
 At times, a sad and half-reluctant look, 
 
 Regretful of the past? " 
 
 Pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy beset us to-day, 
 the poet knew, no less than they did om- fathers 
 before us. We gloss over our own faults, striving 
 to transform them into virtues; we dare to sit in 
 judgment upon our fellow-men, dare to undertake 
 to pluck the mote out of our brother'seye, forgetting 
 the beam that is in our own. And thus we fall 
 into sin, even as did John Underbill of whom 
 Whittier wrote, 
 
 " But the heart is deceitful, the good Book saith. 
 And life hath ever a savor of death. 
 Through hymns of triumph the tempter calls. 
 And whoso thinketh he standeth, falls." 
 
 Frail as man is, however, there are, so Whittier 
 thought, a few noble spirits who fight the good fight, 
 who run the race, who are not disobedient to the 
 heavenly vision. " Life," said he, " hath its royal 
 natures yet, true, tender, brave, and sweet." 
 These, he held, have the power to interpret the 
 oracles of God more clearly than do most of us, and 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 97 
 
 we, knowing them by their fruits to be truly of the 
 Kingdom, may well read with eai'nisst hearts the 
 lesson of their hves. Doubt, they taught Whittier, 
 comes forth from the source of all evil, disbelief in 
 the goodness of God is devil-born, sin against 
 man on earth is sin against our Father in Heaven, 
 " no wrong by wrong is righted, and only hate can 
 come of hating." But their teaching is positive 
 as well as negative: Love will come of love; he 
 who like Burns sings the love of man^ hath sung 
 the love of God; mercy and help extended to the 
 suffering poor is service rendered to the Master; 
 life saved for one's self is lost, but he who loses 
 life for another's sake holds the light of God's 
 eternal day. That one may be called upon to 
 speak the word of rebuke, none knew better than 
 Whittier, but the anger of such a message-bearer, 
 he saw equally well, is kindled righteously only 
 a'gainst the sin, never against the sinner. In all 
 souls, no doubt, is a minghng of good and evil: 
 if then the good, who are never wholly without 
 some spot or blemish, are to be treated charitably, 
 it must not be forgotten that the worst, who are 
 never wholly without some admixture of good, are 
 made in the image of God, have been bought with a 
 price; and however darkened, are still temples of 
 the Holy Ghost. Not yet, Whittier insisted, not 
 yet have these spirits in prison outwearied the 
 patience and the love of God. How then, he asked, 
 shall any man presume to be more just than He who 
 causeth the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust, 
 and his sun to shine upon the evil and the good? 
 
98 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 The divinely sanctioned principle that love is the 
 greatest of all the virtues was cardinal with Whit- 
 tier both as man and as poet. In his daily life he 
 really loved all his friends, as he once said he loved 
 Charles Sumner in particular, " with most un- 
 worldly tenderness." In his poems passage after 
 passage appears which might serve as a modem 
 commentary upon a certain famous chapter in the 
 writings of St. Paul, for clearly the charity which 
 Whittier defined and pictured was not less broad 
 than that inculcated by the Apostle to the Gentiles. 
 The poet felt it and extended it towards enemies 
 no less than towards friends; towards those whose 
 religious faith and political views differed widely 
 from his own, as well as towards those who as- 
 sembled with him in the simple worship of the 
 Quaker meeting house, or who like him fought in 
 one way or another for the abohtion of slavery 
 without a final dissolution of the nation. Filled 
 with satisfaction, however, as Whittier must have 
 been with the (outcome of the Civil War, not a word 
 did he utter which could be construed as an added 
 burden by any Southern heart. His poem. To 
 the Thirty-ninth Congress, called upon that body 
 to refrain from urging a conqueror's terms of shame 
 or insisting upon the bending of suppliant knees. 
 Instead he urged it upon them to smnmon back 
 the lost and wandering, eagerly forgiving and 
 restoring all. 
 
 He might in Ichabod express his indignation at 
 the deflection of Daniel Webster, but even there 
 he held himself in restraint; and after many years, 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 99 
 
 writing upon the same subject in The Lost Occa- 
 sion, he had nothing but gentle words to utter. 
 His sympathy with the Church of Rome, it may be 
 said without offense, was but slight; if in such 
 poems as To Pius IX, The Dream of Pio Nona, 
 and From Perugia, he was denunciatory, he was 
 none the less among the first to insist that indemni- 
 fication must be made for a convent maliciously 
 destroyed near Boston, and was perhaps quite the 
 earliest in this country to defend the cause of the 
 Irish patriots who seemed to be suffering persecu- 
 tion on account of their rehgious faith. In The 
 Vavdois Teacher, he may seem to have been all but 
 uncharitable in his thought, but in the poem which 
 succeeds it in his collected works. The Female 
 Martyr, and in The Angels of Buena Vista, written 
 fifteen years later, one finds nothing but approval 
 for a Christ-Uke deed performed in one case, by a 
 Roman CathoUc nun and, in the other, by lay- 
 women of the same faith and order. For Protes- 
 tantism, it is needless to deny, his appreciation was 
 naturally much stronger than for Romanism; 
 and we must admit that for those within his own 
 communion his love and charity were most marked. 
 The theologian may contend that when we 
 translate a certain passage in Saint Paul's Epistle 
 to the Corinthians, " Love suffereth long and is 
 kind," we have not essentially changed the mean- 
 ing of the older reading. The heart of man knows 
 better. Scholarship has never had the power to 
 change the denotation of a word or to lessen its 
 connotation. Love is ever greater than charity. 
 
100 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Charity indeed may be far-reaching, but one could 
 hardly write of that virtue as Whittier wrote of 
 love in The Rock-Tomb of Bragdore: 
 
 " God's love and man's are here. 
 And love where'er it goes 
 Makes its own atmosphere; 
 Its flowers of Paradise 
 Take root in the eternal ice, 
 And bloom through Polar snows! " 
 
 Certainly Whittier had much more in mind than 
 whaj; is commonly understood as charity when he 
 repeatedly insisted that Love is ever miraculous, 
 when he wrote, " a friend loveth at all times and 
 for the evil day thy brother hves," and when in 
 The Two Rabbis he pictured the meeting of Nathan 
 and Isaac in the desert, 
 
 " Side by side 
 In the low sunshine by the turban stone 
 They knelt; each made his brother's woe his own. 
 Forgetting, in the agony and stress 
 Of pitying love, his claim of selfishness; 
 Peace, for his friend besought, his own became ; 
 His prayers were answered in another's name; 
 And when at last they rose up to embrace; 
 Each saw God's pardon in his brother's face." 
 
 Whittier beyond a doubt fully understood the 
 meaning of the second great commandment, " Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Full as well, 
 also, did he know, that " greater love hath no man 
 than this, that he lay down his hfe for his friend." 
 Few of us, it is true, are called upon to make such 
 a sacrifice in any literal sense, yet the better part 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 101 
 
 is not therefore taken away. " Every self-denial, 
 every forgiveness," some old saint once said, " is 
 a little crucifixion of ourselves in the divine image." 
 Whittier was thinking the same thought when he 
 wrote " Love scarce is love that never knows the 
 sunshine of forgiving " and he fell back upon it 
 again in the sonnet called Requital and yet again 
 in that entitled Forgiveness. In the latter Whittier, 
 recording an experience, unconsciously uttered a 
 rebuke to every man who cherishes at any time a 
 thought of hatred or resentment towards his 
 fellow-men: 
 
 " My heart was heavy, for its trust had been 
 
 Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong; 
 So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, 
 
 One summer Sabbath day I strolled among 
 The green mounds of the village burial place. 
 
 Where, pondering how all human love and hate 
 Find one sad level; and how, soon or late. 
 Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face. 
 
 And cold hands folded over a still heart, 
 Pass the green threshold of our common grave. 
 
 Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, 
 Awed for myself, and pitying my race, 
 Our common sorrow, hke a mighty wave, 
 Swept all my pride away, and, trembUng, I forgave! " 
 
 The first of the Chr^st^ian virtues is faith and is 
 directed towards God; the greatest is love and has 
 primarily, the Scriptures tell us, to do with one's 
 fellow-men; the third, arising perhaps out of a 
 union of the other two is hope — a virtue which a 
 man may indulge in for himseK. In other words, if 
 we so live with our neighbor whom we have seen 
 
102 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 as to merit the approval of God whom we have not 
 seen, we may cherish the behef which Whittier 
 himself had in mind when he wrote of Sumner, 
 
 " There is no end for souls like his, 
 No night for children of the day! " 
 
 This hope of conscious immortaUty was funda- 
 mental with the Quaker poet. To one who would 
 have disputed the matter with him, he repHed, 
 " There is no great use in arguing that question. 
 One must feel the truth; you cannot climb to 
 heaven on a syllogism." It is certainly the feel- 
 ing and not the intellect which is behind the per- 
 sonal poems Ego, My Soul and I, and My Name- 
 sake; in the hnes addressed to Ohver Wendell 
 Holmes, to Edmund Clarence Stedman, and to 
 Lydia Maria Child; and in the nature pictures, 
 The Grave hy the Lake, The River Path, and The 
 Last Eve of Summer. In these poems and in num- 
 bers of others, the fact of some form of immortaUty 
 is assumed without proof. Vague at times Whit- 
 tier necessarily was when he treated this matter, 
 vague both in thought and expression, yet he not 
 infrequently permitted himself to speak with full 
 conviction. Perhaps in no moment did he give 
 clearer utterance to his feeling of certainty that 
 we do not wholly die, than when the news reached 
 him of the death of Lucy Hooper, — a young 
 woman, whose early death Whittier seems never 
 to have ceased to mourn. Writing to her mother, 
 he said at the close of his letter, " She is not gone. 
 Her pure affections, her firm intellect, her faith 
 
John Greenkaf Whittier 103 
 
 and love, and simple trust in her Heavenly Father 
 are not lost. She lives still, — a glorified dweller 
 in the same universe with ourselves." A few weeks 
 later the same thought found expression in 
 the lines, 
 
 " Not mine the hope of India's son, 
 
 Of slumbering in obUvion's rest, 
 life's mjnriads blending into one. 
 
 In blank annihilation blest; 
 Dust atoms of the infinite, 
 
 Sparks scattered from the central light. 
 And winning back through mortal pain 
 Their old unconsciousness again. 
 No! I have friends in Spirit Land, 
 Not shadows in a shadowy band, 
 
 Not others, but themselves are they. 
 And still I think of them the same 
 As when the Master's Summons came; 
 Their change, — the holy morn-Ught breaking 
 Upon the dream-worn sleeper waking, — 
 
 A change from twilight into day." 
 
 Strong as was Whittier's hope in the personal 
 immortahty of the soul, doubts would occasionally 
 present themselves. He admitted in the stanzas 
 entitled Within the Gates that over him at tipies, 
 as he awaited his summons beside the inevitable 
 door, the impenetrable wall of death cast down a 
 shadow of distrust and gloom; he betrayed in 
 Snowbound and elsewhere his depression at the 
 thought of his elder sister as having passed beneath 
 the low green tent whose curtain never outward 
 swings, or at that of his friends as having entered 
 upon the unknown way from which no step has 
 
104 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 ever yet returned. He could but ask now and 
 then, when no whisper broke the silence, when no 
 token of any kind was seen, " Will the voices of 
 the dead once more greet us, will the shut eyeUds 
 ever rise? " He canvassed the evidences which 
 seem to be furnished by omens, trances, and 
 dreams; he even made some investigation, it is 
 said, of the doctrines and the practices of spiritual- 
 ism, but such proof as he drew from these sources 
 proved so little helpful that he could but express 
 himself, late in life, in lines addressed to Lydia 
 Maria Child, in the words, 
 
 " I feel the unutterable longing, 
 The hunger of the heart is mine; 
 I reach and grope for hands in darkness, 
 My ear grows sharp for voice or sign." 
 
 Not through any organ of sense, however, did 
 proof positive come to Whittier. As he wrote in 
 the poem but just now quoted from, " On the lips 
 of all we question, the finger of God's silence lies." 
 Not to his head, therefore, but to his heart; not 
 to his mind but to his feelings did the answer make 
 itself clear. Nature might now and then hint at a 
 resurrection, the blooming of flower and the bud- 
 ding of tree might be symbols and types of our 
 destiny, — the destiny of man; yet Whittier's 
 trust in the Divine Goodness was the real basis of 
 his hope that the soul lives forever. It was that 
 trust indeed which led him, in Snow-Bound, to ask 
 in full confidence of an affirmative reply, as he 
 thought of the death of his youngest sister, 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 105 
 
 " And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, 
 
 Am I not richer than of old? 
 Safe in thy immortality, 
 
 What change can reach the wealth I hold? 
 
 What chance can mar the pearl and gold 
 Thy love hath left in trust with me? 
 And while in Ufe's late afternoon. 
 
 Where cool and long the shadows grow, 
 I walk to meet the night that soon 
 
 Shall shape and shadow overflow, 
 I cannot feel that thou art far. 
 Since near at hand the angels are; 
 And when the sunset gates unbar. 
 
 Shall I not see thee waiting stand. 
 And white, against the evening star. 
 
 The welcome of thy beckoning hand? " 
 
 The very fact that our hearts reach out in yearn- 
 ing was to Whittier an evidence sufficient, for he 
 was certain that God would never mock the hope 
 that He Himself has implanted, nor permit a love 
 which He Himself has prompted, to speak its prayer 
 in vain. Thus confident he still further buttressed 
 his hope by a reason which the most materialistic 
 thinker must admit has no little force. The great 
 principles of the indestructibility of matter and of 
 the conservation of energy he extended to the 
 spiritual world, asking " if the waves of the sea 
 and the dust of the earth remaining unwasted 
 through all their many changes, attest the fixed 
 economy of God, shall the kingly mind not outlive 
 their insensate existence, shall not the God-Hke 
 energy of thought survive their gross uncon- 
 sciousness? " The same reasoning he again pre- 
 sented in writing of the death of a friend, " Surely 
 
106 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 the Divine economy must be conservative of thee," 
 and yet again in lines inscribed upon a flyleaf of a 
 copy of Longfellow's Poems, 
 
 " Yet howsoever changed or tost, 
 Not even a wreath of mist is lost, 
 No atom can itself exhaust. 
 
 " So shall the soul's superior force 
 Live on and run its endless course 
 In God's unlimited universe." 
 
 Of what the life^ of the soul is to be after its 
 separation from the body, Whittier's verse is less 
 circumstantial than Bryant's on one hand and less 
 vague than Emerson's on the other. From the 
 behef expressed in The Quaker Alumni and in 
 June on the Merrimac that the dead rest as do we 
 who still live, in God's unchanging mercy alone, 
 and again from the questions asked in The Singer, 
 
 " What to shut eyes has Grod revealed? 
 What hear the ears that death has sealed? 
 What xmdreamed beauty passing show 
 Requites the loss of all we know? " 
 
 from such behef and from such questions, Whittier 
 passed to a number of possibUities which he re- 
 garded as highly probable. He often Ungered on 
 the thought that the spirits of the dead are near us 
 and have some knowledge of oiu- joys and sorrows. 
 He hked to feel that their happiness is in some 
 measure dependent upon our loving memory of 
 what they were when they hved with us upon 
 earth. There can be, he insisted, no fearful 
 
John Greenleaf Whittier 107 
 
 change, no sudden wonder, no new revealing. 
 The work which best pleased the soul below, he 
 dared say, in one poem, must be the work above; 
 nor did he hesitate to assert elsewhere that the 
 souls of the living must touch the souls of the 
 dead, since, as he said, " God breaks no thread His 
 hand has spun." It is this confidence which under- 
 Ues The Eternal Goodness; it is this perfect trust 
 which gives strength to the hnes called At Last; 
 it is this abiding hope which breathes in Snow 
 Bound. The sceptic falls to silence, and the proud 
 intellect is humbled before the simple faith which 
 led the Quaker poet to write in the face of proofs 
 advanced by the materialist to show that death 
 ends all, 
 
 " Yet love will dream, and Faith will trust, 
 (Since He who knows our need is just), 
 That somehow, somewhere meet we must. 
 Alas for him who never sees 
 The stars shine through his cypress trees! 
 Who, hopeless, liys his dead away. 
 Nor looks to see the breaking day 
 Across the mournful marbles play! 
 Who hath not learned, in hours of faith. 
 
 The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
 That Life is ever lord of Death, 
 
 And Love can never lose its own!" 
 
VI 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 
 
 Among American poets, Longfellow is without 
 doubt the most uniformly ethical. It is true that 
 a noble purpose, an elevated ideal, is never lack- 
 ing in our greater literature, yet Longfellow more 
 than any other American author gives his readers 
 the impression that his sense of goodness was 
 innate rather than accepted, felt rather than 
 defined. ReUgiously, there is a dignity in Bryant, 
 a pathos in Poe, a loftiness in Emerson, a tenderness 
 in Whittier, not found in Longfellow; still, if the 
 Cambridge poet is lackiag to some degree in his 
 possession of these several qualities, he exhibits in 
 their place, when he turns to the contemplation of 
 the duties and conduct of hfe, unusual clarity of 
 vision, steadiness of heart, and calmness of soul. 
 Bryant interests us, because the paths which led 
 him to confident hope are hkewise open to every 
 other man; Poe appeals to us through the very 
 desperation with which he clung to his wavering 
 faith that God is good; Emerson flatters us by the 
 philosophic tone which he imparts to beUef; and 
 Whittier increases our self-respect with his iasis- 
 tence that the Holy Spirit finds a dwelHng place in 
 every human heart. Longfellow, however, seldom 
 draws us in any of these ways. The reUgious 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 109 
 
 element, so far as it finds expression in his poetry; 
 is not evidential as in Bryant, nor romantic as in 
 Poe, nor intellectual as in Emerson, nor intuitional 
 as in Whittier; rather is it moralistic, vary though 
 it may from the tacit on one hand to the openly 
 didactic on the other. 
 
 Longfellow's frank acceptance of his moral call 
 has unfortunately made him the victim at times of 
 much adverse criticism and, in some places, of 
 not a little ridicule. With the rise of the theory 
 that art exists solely for art's sake, war was de- 
 clared against all poetry which had any evident 
 purpose beyond the giving of mere emotional 
 pleasure. It came to be assumed that a person 
 of real culture and true refinement of taste must 
 have outgrown the poems of Longfellow and must 
 therefore either have left them with other play- 
 things of youth to one's successors in the school- 
 room, or have handed them pityingly on to such 
 men and women as were dead in the sin of common- 
 placeness. In time, however, the reaction set in; 
 and signs are not wanting to show that Long- 
 fellow's undeviating ethical sincerity is the very 
 quality which assures him a permanent place in 
 literature. It cannot be allowed, of course,- that 
 mere preaching in verse, lofty though the lesson 
 may be, is real poetry from any point of view; 
 still even among didactic poets, some are elected 
 unto honor, some unto dishonor. Truth more 
 often than not is beautiful, and so likewise is good- 
 ness; and whenever beautiful goodness and 
 beautiful truth draw to themselves adequately 
 
110 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 beautiful expression, poetry, as Keats long ago 
 implied,, is the inevitable result. 
 
 Of Longfellow's openly didactic poems, the most 
 frequently repeated, no doubt, is A Psalm of Life. 
 It has become so familiar, indeed, that we glance 
 at it only to pass it over, or at most to read it 
 without appreciation. That it is not poetry of the 
 highest type may be admitted at the outset; 
 yet the most jaded mind, if it can rid itself of the 
 increment of what others have said, will have some 
 reanswering thrill to many of its noble lines. On 
 the whole, we do not object to being taught, if we 
 are convinced that the teacher speaks as one hav- 
 ing real authority. It may be well therefore to 
 refrain from brushing aside too hastily or con- 
 temptuously those famiUar, unaffected stanzas 
 which frankly point out that " life is real, life is 
 earnest "and rise to a culmination hardly less than 
 scriptural in the hues, 
 
 " Act, act in the living Present! 
 Heart within and God o'erhead! " 
 
 The mention of A Psalm of Life brings to mind 
 other poems fuUy as well known for their like 
 content and equal purpose. The Light of Stars, 
 at the time of its first pubUcation called A Second 
 Psalm of Life, speaks the lesson, " Be resolute and 
 calm, be self-possessed and still " ; The Ladder of 
 St. Augustine, adopting the words of the early 
 church father, bids us rise each day upon the 
 wrecks of yesterday; Excelsior, despite the many 
 parodies made upon it, is stiU capable of enhearten- 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 111 
 
 ing the bearer of a forlorn hope; The Builders 
 inculcates the teaching of the apostle that the body 
 as the temple of God must be made beautiful and 
 clean both within and without; The Beleaguered 
 City utters the call to prayer before which the 
 midnight phantoms of doubt depart; and The 
 Castle Builder, addressed though it was to a child 
 at play among his blocks, reaches a larger audience 
 with its message, 
 
 " Build on and make thy castles high and fair, 
 Rising and reaching upward to the skies; 
 Listen to voices in the upper air 
 Nor lose thy simple faith in mysteries." 
 
 Religiously didactic however as are many of the 
 poems upon which Longfellow's reputation rests, 
 it must not be hastily concluded that in them his 
 ambition found its end. His cherished desire from 
 the beginning of his career seems to have been to 
 produce a noble poem upon the life and influence 
 of Christ. Under the date of November 19, 1849, 
 he wrote in his diary, " And now I long to try a 
 loftier strain, and subhmer Song whose broken 
 melodies have for so many years breathed through 
 my soul in the better hours of life." A second 
 entry made two months later shows that this 
 sublimer song which the poet hoped to compose 
 was to be dramatic in form and to bear the title of 
 Christus. Yet even a decade earher, in the very 
 year of the pubHcation of Voices of the Night, his 
 first volume of poems, he was contemplating, we 
 know, a poetic treatment of the heroine Elsie, who 
 
112 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 did eventually appear as the central character in 
 The Golden Legend. The Christus in its entirety- 
 was given to the pubHc in 1872, thus bringing to an 
 end a work upon a religious theme which had 
 dominated the author's life for more than thirty 
 years. Nevertheless, the thought which had made 
 so strong an appeal was not even then dismissed 
 from the poet's mind. Judas Maccabaus, which 
 immediately followed the earUer work must, 
 beyond a doubt, be regarded as an offshoot of the 
 theme underlying The Divine Tragedy; and cer- 
 tainly the Unks binding the important posthumous 
 fragment Michael Angela to the Christus are neither 
 few nor negligible. It is safe to conclude, there- 
 fore, that however varied were Longfellow's 
 literary interests, the subject of his great religious 
 poem was ever, in some form or another, before 
 his mind. One critic, indeed, has gone so far as 
 to speak of the theme of the Christus as " the 
 flame by night and the pillar of cloud by day which 
 led the poet's mind in all its onward movements." 
 Discount this statement as we may, we can but 
 feel that it rests upon a firm substratum of truth; 
 and we readily agree with the same critic when he 
 goes on to say that Longfellow's resolution " to 
 undertake a long and elaborate poem by the holy 
 name of Christ " was " a most rational and at the 
 same time most satisfactory expression of the 
 poet's personality." 
 
 Important, however, as the trilogy c*f the Christus 
 is as an indication of ethical unity in Longfellow's 
 literary life, it gives no far-rea,ching insight into the 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 113 
 
 details of his religious belief. A drama, even in 
 the case of a poet hke Longfellow, can do hardly 
 more than show the author's bias of mind or in- 
 cKnation of heart. The reader, whatever his 
 suspicion, must assume that the several characters 
 speak in their own person and utter thoughts 
 which are often not their creator's. Still it is of 
 value to recall that we have Longfellow's own 
 record of a desire to show in The Golden Legend 
 that " through the darkness and corruption of the 
 Middle Ages ran a bright stream of Faith strong 
 enough for all the exigencies of life and death." 
 Likewise is it well not to forget that though the 
 words of the Finale of the Christus were put into 
 the mouth of Saint John, they were none the less 
 the expression of Longfellow's own estimate of the 
 essential teachings of Jesus. 
 
 " Poor, sad Humanity 
 
 Through all the dust and heat 
 
 Turns back with bleeding feet, 
 By the weary road it came. 
 Unto the simple thought 
 By the great Master taught, 
 And that remaineth stiU: 
 Not he that repeateth the name, 
 But he that doeth the will! " 
 
 One turns unwilUngly from the dramas of Long- 
 fellow, since they contain many passages of high 
 quaUty, for which grandeur is often not too strong 
 a term, and which show at times in both thought 
 and diction an elevation which is not found else- 
 where in the poet's work. With equal reluctance 
 
114 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 one must pass over with mere mention both the 
 noble rendering of the Divina Commedia and the 
 host of minor translations from various languages. 
 Interest in the great religious poem of Dante 
 subtended quite as great an arc in Longfellow's 
 Uterary career as that marked off by his attraction 
 to the life and abiding influence of Christ; and the 
 mere naming of The Good Shepherd from the 
 Spanish, The Angel and the Child from the French, 
 The Children of the Lord's Supper from the Swedish, 
 The Statue over the Cathedral Door from the Ger- 
 man, and The Soul's Complaint against the Body 
 from the Anglo-Saxon, recalls numbers of other 
 translations which show Longfellow's pronounced 
 and long-continued sympathy with the spiritual 
 thoughts of foreign poets. StiU, despite the 
 importance of these EngUsh versions of reUgious 
 poems found in other lands, one hardly dares 
 assume that the point of view found in them was 
 necessarily Longfellow's own. For the same rea- 
 son one must all but eliminate the considerable 
 number of longer and shorter narrative poems, 
 despite the fact that the rejection of Evangeline, 
 The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles 
 Standish, and Tales of a Wayside Inn limits one to 
 a study of less than one-half of Longfellow's 
 original non-dramatic poetry. Nevertheless, one 
 is not thereby left without a sufficient body of 
 material to assist him in reaching very definite 
 conclusions regarding Longfellow's most intimate 
 rehgious convictions. The lyrics of which Long- 
 fellow was the author, form no inconsiderable part 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 115 
 
 of his work either in amount or in value. Still 
 further, the personal thoughts found scattered 
 through his larger works are sure to be rediscovered 
 in his shorter poems, sometimes merely repeated, 
 sometimes developed at large. Finally, it is well 
 to add, these briefer songs are so widely known 
 and so greatly loved that in studying them one 
 often finds himself looking not more into the 
 poet's heart than into his own. 
 
 The attentive and reflective reader of Long- 
 fellow's shorter poems soon discovers that their 
 author was far from being a poet of evasion as was 
 Holmes pronouncedly in all of his earlier work, and 
 equally as far from being sceptical as Lowell 
 undoubtedly was at intervals. Longfellow's relig- 
 ious thought, moreover, was not the result of a 
 development, as was the case with Bryant; nor 
 did it define itself into a philosophy, as did Emer- 
 son's; neither did it take on so practical and 
 circumstantial a form as did Whittier's. The key- 
 note of Longfellow's rehgious belief was perhaps 
 sounded when he wrote in his diary, " We have 
 but one life here on earth and we must make that 
 beautiful. And to do this, health and elasticity 
 of mind are needful; and whatever endangers or 
 impedes them must be avoided." Calmness and 
 sweetness of spirit in full accordance with this 
 entry were indeed the chief characteristics of Long- 
 fellow's temperament. Through the possession of 
 some unusual and superior instinct, his soul 
 seemed unerringly to accept or reject whatever 
 would assist or delay its fullest development. 
 
116 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Apparently, without resort to any book, council, 
 or creed, as a source of authority, he took his 
 unquestioning stand upon the three important 
 fundamental doctrines, the goodness of God, the 
 divinity of Christ, and the immortaUty of the 
 soul. Never deahng in subtleties of logic, he seems 
 to have assumed that Uke himself every one of his 
 readers had become as a Uttle child and therefore 
 worthy tp enter into the kingdom of Heaven. 
 Although Longfellow at no time turned to the 
 Bible for authoritative substantiation of theologi- 
 cal doctrine or reUgious faith, his poems abound 
 in Scriptural allusions and quotations. All was 
 fish to his net when he desired to express himself 
 poetically. He laid hold upon whatever would 
 help him to render his thought clear or his expres- 
 sion artistic, and made it serve those purposes 
 alone. From the nature of the subject-matter 
 Judas MaccabcBus was woven, warp and woof, from 
 allusions to the Jewish Apocrypha; and Puritan 
 stories like The Courtship of Miles Standish and 
 Giles Corey of Salem Farms, Quaker tales like 
 Elizabeth and John Endicott, medieval pictures hke 
 The Vision Beautiful, King Robert of Sicily, and 
 The Children's Crusade, and scenes in the life of 
 Christ like The Three Kings, Blind Bartimeus, and 
 The Sifting of Peter gained and still gain pronounced 
 verisimilitude from their frequent allusions to 
 incidents, characters, and teachings found in the 
 New Testament. In some cases Longfellow even 
 went so far as to transcribe into his poems long 
 passages unchanged in diction from the King James 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 117 
 
 version of the Scriptures. Perhaps the most 
 strikiiig, though by no means the only example of 
 such incorporation of material is found in the 
 eighth section of The Divine Tragedy. There, 
 except that, to satisfy the demands of metre, 
 seven unimportant words are omitted and six others 
 equally unimportant are interpolated, the parable 
 of the two prayers offered in the temple is trans- 
 ferred bodily from the eighteenth chapter of the 
 Gospel according to Saint Luke. 
 
 " Two men went up into the temple to pray. 
 The one was a self-righteous Pharisee, 
 The other a Publican. And the Pharisee 
 Stood and prayed thus within himself! O God, 
 I thank thee that I am not as other men, 
 Extortioners, unjust, adulterers, 
 Or even as this Pubhcan. I fast 
 Twice in the week, and also I give tithes 
 Of all that I possess! The PubUcan, 
 Standing afar off, would not Uft so much 
 Even as his eyes to Heaven, but smote his breast. 
 Saying: God be merciful to me a sinner! 
 I tell you that this man went to his house 
 More justified than the other. Every one 
 That doth exalt himself shall be abased. 
 And he that humbleth himself shall be exalted! " 
 
 Like all poets Longfellow frequently turned to 
 history for subject-matter; but he did not, like 
 Bryant and Whittier, make use of it to support his 
 religious convictions. A similar statement might 
 be made regarding his treatment of nature. She 
 was not to him a teacher as she was to Bryant; 
 nor part and parcel of God as she was to Emerson ; 
 
118 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 nor a symbol as she was to Whittier. To Long- 
 fellow she had objective existence, and because of 
 her beauty was worthy of admiration; yet she 
 seems never to have been to him a source of truth. 
 Once indeed, writing under the influence of a 
 German poet, Longfellow, in the early poem en- 
 titled Flowers, spoke of the blossoms of the field as 
 a revelation of God and later on hailed them as 
 
 " Emblems of our own great resurrection, 
 Emblems of the bright and better land." 
 
 Such a use of Nature, however, hardly ever recurs 
 in the whole body of his poetry; as a rule, she had 
 for him a message of a far different order. True, 
 he called the songs of birds " lovely lyrics written 
 by the hand of God " and regarded the geologist 
 Agassiz as " summoned to read what is still unread 
 in the manuscripts of God " and found, hke Bryant, 
 that the forest is at times a cathedral far surpassing 
 any edifice of worship built by himian hands; 
 yet he turned to nature primarily, not for informa- 
 tion, but for consolation, inspiration, repose. He 
 felt the calm, majestic presence of the night, as she 
 drew near to lay her fingers on the Ups of Care and 
 bid them complain no more; he learned from the 
 rising of the red planet Mars, the star of the uncon- 
 quered will, how sublime a thing it is to suffer and 
 be strong; he looked upon the river moving onward 
 without haste or noise and knew that wisdom Ues 
 in calm contentment and in perfect self-control. 
 Plainly Nature to Longfellow, as he said in a sonnet 
 to which he gave that very name, was not a teacher 
 
Henry Wadsworth LongfeUow 119 
 
 solving problems and demonstrating rules; rather 
 was she a mentor leading mankin,d gently, yet not 
 the less firmly, to the true understanding of life. 
 
 " As a fond mother when the day is o'er, 
 
 Leads by the hand her Uttle child to bed. 
 
 Half willing, half reluctant to be led, 
 And leaves his broken playthings on the floor, 
 Still gazing at them through the open door, 
 
 Nor whoUy reassured and comforted 
 
 By promises of o|;hers in their stead, 
 Which, though more splendid, may not please him more; 
 So Nature deals with us, and takes away 
 
 Our playthings one by one, and by the hand 
 
 Leads us to rest so gently, that we go 
 Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay. 
 
 Being too fuU of sleep to understand 
 
 How far th' imknown transcends the what we know." 
 
 The theological concept of the Trinity seems not 
 to have greatly interested Longfellow. Certainly 
 he dismissed it much more readily than Bryant to 
 whom it persisted in presenting itself; and he 
 gave it far less attention than Whittier whose 
 Trinitas was the record of a real agitation of soul. 
 That he accepted the doctrine as truth may per- 
 haps be assumed from the couplet which stands as 
 the fifth of his several experiments in Elegiac Verse, 
 
 " How can the Three be One? you ask me : I answer by asking, 
 HaU and snow and rain, are they not three and yet one? " 
 
 However much or little these Knes may be assumed 
 to prove, it is but just to admit that of the several 
 persons in the Trinity, Longfellow in his poems 
 only occasionally mentioned the Holy Spirit and 
 
120 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 in no place greatly developed his thought of the 
 Father and the Son. Manifestly, he trusted in 
 the power, the wisdom, the justice, the mercy, and 
 the goodness of God; yet his faith seldom, if ever, 
 found any other expression than the reiteration in 
 one form or another that the ways of our Heavenly 
 Father are always best. Again, although the most 
 minute details of the hfe of Christ, so far as they 
 are recorded in the Gospels, were well known to 
 him, he was never led to dwell, in his shorter poems 
 at least, upon his belief in the incarnation, the 
 resurrection, and the ascension. His failure to 
 give a precise definition of his reUgious faith, how- 
 ever, does not at any time obscure the fact that he 
 was Christian in the fullest sense of that term. 
 Certainly he cannot at any time be regarded as a 
 doubter, if we will but recall his frequent insistence 
 that Christ is eternal. Again, though we may 
 rarely be able to place a finger upon a dogmatic 
 statement, we find the fundamental teachings of 
 Jesus, Uke a good diffused, permeating the whole of 
 the poet's work. Turn to whatever page we will, 
 those teachings appear, not as the pattern it is true, 
 but rather as threads serving now as warp and now 
 as woof in the poems of Longfellow's weaving. 
 Thus it comes about that the poet's readers are 
 driven to the conclusion that his faith was sound. 
 Only on such an assumption can sincerity be 
 postulated as one of his attributes, can real force 
 be regarded as inherent in his frequently repeated 
 idea, most sweetly expressed perhaps in the lines 
 from the poem entitled Elegiac, 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 121 
 
 " In a haven of rest my heart is riding at anchor, 
 Held by the chains of love, held by the anchors of trust! " 
 
 Upon the daily life and the spiritual state of the 
 minister of the Gospel, Longfellow held quite 
 decided opinions. To his mind the man who 
 beUeved himself called to work in the vineyard of 
 his Master must needs strive hourly to be perfect 
 even as his Father in Heaven is perfect. What in 
 Longfellow's opinion such a man should not be, 
 is best described in The Birds of KilUngworth. 
 There the parson of the town is pictured as — 
 
 " A man austere. 
 The instinct of whose nature was to kill; 
 
 The wrath of God he preached from year to year. 
 And read with fervor, Edwards on the Will; 
 
 His favorite pastime was to slay the deer 
 In Summer on some Adirondac hiU; 
 E'en now, while walking down the rural lane. 
 He lopped the wayside lilies with his cane." 
 
 In contrast with this satiric presentation of a 
 shepherd who could have been but a blind leader of 
 the blind, one recalls the priest in Evangeline, that 
 Father Fehcian, who stilled the strife and con- 
 tention of his angry people and led them to utter 
 the forgiving petition of their crucified Saviour. 
 One thinks too of one of the story-tellers in the 
 Wayside Inn, the gentle theologian who practiced 
 the Gospel of the Golden Rule and strove " to 
 build the universal church lofty as is the love of 
 God and ample as the wants of man." The true 
 pastor, Longfellow held, does not need a stately 
 
122 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 edifice wherein he and his flock may house them- 
 selves while he delivers his message. The sm-- 
 roundings are nothing, the man is all, he wrote in 
 Old St. David's at Radnor, — 
 
 " It is not the wall of stone without 
 
 That makes the building small or great, 
 But the soul's hght shining round about. 
 And the faith tha,t overcometh doubt, 
 And the love that stronger is than hate." 
 
 Such hght, such faith, such love, come not, in 
 Longfellow's opinion, by chance. In the Hymn 
 written for his brother's ordination he clearly 
 recorded his behef that the true minister of God is 
 divinely summoned, divinely commissioned, and 
 divinely allowed to be the daily companion of his 
 risen Lord. 
 
 " Christ to the yoimg man said: ' Yet one thing more; 
 If thou wouldst perfect be. 
 Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor. 
 And come and foUow me! ' " 
 
 " Within this temple Christ again, unseen. 
 Those sacred words hath said 
 And His invisible hands today have been 
 Laid on a young man's head. 
 
 " And evermore beside hJTn on his way 
 The unseen Christ shall move. 
 That he may lean upon his arm and say, 
 ' Dost thou, dear Lord, approve? ' " 
 
 In the poem just cited Longfellow obviously 
 expressed his belief that the minister of the Gospel 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 123 
 
 must accept quite literally the words of Jesus, 
 " Lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of 
 the world." Elsewhere, he no less plainly showed 
 it to be his opinion that all men would do well to 
 make of their rehgion, not a theory, but a practice. 
 In the theological sciences of dogmatics and 
 apologetics, he had hardly even the most remote 
 interest, far less indeed, save perhaps Whitman, 
 than had any other American poet. Certainly in 
 th,e matter of religion Longfellow seems never to 
 have felt himself called upon to make assertions, 
 to seek evidence, or to defend his position. Had a 
 person approached the poet with a demand for 
 the intellectual basis of his beUef, he would no 
 doubt have been greeted with mild surprise; and 
 had he pressed the question, he would probably 
 have received no further answer than " I have felt." 
 Nevertheless, Longfellow, looking upon the ideal 
 of Christ as that toward which every man should 
 strive, made righteousness of life the constant 
 burden of his message. Through the angel in 
 The Golden Legend, Longfellow himself cried out to 
 all men, — 
 
 " Be noble in every thought 
 Be true in every deed! , 
 Let not the illusions of the senses 
 Betray thee to deadly offences. 
 Be strong! be good! be pure! 
 The right only shall endure, 
 All things else are but pretenses." 
 
 As in this passage, so elsewhere was Longfellow 
 often formally didactic; yet his method was almost 
 
124 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 always persuasive rather than preceptive. So 
 attractively did he clothe his thought of what 
 constitutes the better ordering of life, so skillfully 
 did he sound the call to duty and to the need of 
 hourly choosing the good part which shall not be 
 taken away, that it may not unjustly be said of 
 him, as it was said long ago of a greater than he, 
 " the common people heard him gladly." 
 
 In his comprehensive outlook upon the ages of a 
 man's life, Longfellow saw not seven but seventy 
 times seven. Judging after the manner of the 
 spirit and not after the manner of the world, he 
 regarded each day as hardly less than an epoch 
 in the life of the soul. Again and again he dwelt 
 upon the fact that the past cannot be recalled, 
 cannot be revived. This thought is the burden of 
 the songs in Keramos, as it is also the chief teaching 
 of Morituri Salutamus 
 
 " Whatever hath been written shall remain, 
 Nor be erased nor written o'er again; 
 The unwritten only still belongs to thee: 
 Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be." 
 
 The same lesson reappears in The Two Rivers 
 where the streams of Yesterday and of Tomorrow 
 are spoken of as making their way one to the land 
 of darkness and dreams, the other to the land of 
 promise and light. It recurs in Michael Angela, 
 in Valdesso's remark that " we ourselves when we 
 commit a sin, lose Paradise as much as Adam did "; 
 and it finds its most beautiful, though at the same 
 time most solemn expression in Sundown, 
 
Henry Wodsworth Longfellow 125 
 
 " On the road of life one milestone more! 
 In the book of life one leaf turned o'er! 
 Like a red seal is the setting sun 
 On the good and evil men have done, — 
 Naught can today restore! " 
 
 Irrevocably gone Longfellow might teach the 
 past to be, yet he never once sounded the note of 
 despair. He might bewail the fact that labor with 
 what zeal we will, something still remains undone, 
 yet he pointed out more than once the futility of 
 sitting down to measure by any absolute standard 
 the loss and gain in each day's life. He saw that 
 defeat might be victory in disguise; he believed with 
 Saint Augustine that " of our vices we can build a 
 ladder if we will but tread beneath our feet each 
 deed of shame "; he held that we might well fix 
 our eyes upon the path leading to higher destinies, — 
 
 " Nor deem the irrevocable Past 
 As wholly wasted, wholly vain. 
 If rising on its wrecks, at last 
 To something nobler we attain." 
 
 Ready though he was to admit in The Sifting of 
 Peter that the scars of sin remain, that lost inno- 
 cence returns no more, he none the less insisted 
 that earnest souls may press through dust and heat, 
 and refusing to accept disaster as final, may for their 
 very failures find themselves the stronger, and 
 become true conquerors at last. LongfeUow plainly 
 saw that there is no man but shaU be tempted, 
 tried, and sifted, no man but shall sometimes fall 
 into sin, no man but shall some day deny his Master; 
 still he felt that even in the hour of deepest humilia- 
 
126 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 tion, a man may cherish the consciousness of his 
 unquenchable divinity and hope to build, however 
 late, a tabernacle worthy of his Lord. 
 
 Convinced that neither in the clamor of the 
 crowded thoroughfare nor in the shouts and plau- 
 dits of the multitude, but in ourselves alone are 
 triumph and defeat, Longfellow laid stress upon the 
 moulding power which exists in the performance of 
 of the duty lying nearest to one's hand. Such is 
 the basic thought of The Builders, of Gaspar 
 Becerra and of many another poem. What though 
 one die unknown? Longfellow asked in substance, 
 what though in the passing of the years one be 
 quite forgotten? What though one's tower like 
 Giotto's stand forever incomplete, 
 
 " No endeavor is in vain; 
 
 Its reward is in the doing, 
 And the raptiire of pursuing 
 Is the prize the vanquished win." 
 
 " Work is prayer," says Vittoria in speaking of the 
 labors of Michael Angelo; and that great artist 
 Unconsciously re-echoes her thought when he re- 
 bukes the unstable Benvenuto Cellini with the 
 words, ," Have faith in nothing but in industry, 
 and work right on through censure and applause." 
 Pope Juhus, too, in the same drama, holding that 
 all great achievements are the natural fruits of a 
 great character, is confident that by the excellence 
 of the work we know the master's hand. As in 
 these words which Longfellow placed upon the lips 
 of three of his characters, so elsewhere did he reiter- 
 ate his steady behef that success is based upon 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 127 
 
 honest unappreciated daily toil, upon work hourly- 
 performed for the very work's sake. Nor, to his 
 mind, we may conclude from another passage in 
 Michael Angela, is the structure of a noble mind ever 
 builded upon foundations essentially different or in 
 any way less secure. 
 
 " When anything is done, 
 People see not the patient doing of it. 
 Nor think how great would be the loss to man 
 If it had not been done. As in a building 
 Stone rests on stone, and wanting the foundation 
 All would be wanting, so in human hfe 
 Each action rests on the foregoing event. 
 That made it possible, but is forgotten 
 And buried in the earth." 
 
 To each hour its work, to each day its task, to 
 each life its duty, is the great unifying principle 
 underlying Longfellow's theory of character and 
 conduct. Obedient himself to the call which, as 
 he said in the Prelude to Voices of the Night, sum- 
 moned him from the contemplation of mountain, 
 forest, and stream to an acquaintance with the 
 sorrows and joys dwelling within the human heart, 
 he could weU be urgent with his fellow-men that 
 they should acquit themselves nobly in the battle of 
 life. Exhausted at times by his own toil with 
 book and pen, he tells us in Weariness, he could but 
 look with pity upon the helpless infant whose little 
 hands must learn to serve or rule, whose little feet 
 must wander on through hopes and fears, must 
 ache and bleed beneath their load. Nevertheless 
 he saw clearly that those who follow us, must find 
 
128 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 hope and strength for themselves, however eager 
 we may be to yield them aid or spare them pain. 
 Looking back upon his early days, he might in 
 My Lost Youth recall that " a boy's way is the 
 wind's way and the thoughts of youth are long, 
 long thoughts "; or safe in his manhood, he might 
 rejoice to see the young spring forward in the race, 
 full of hope and sublime audacity; still nothing 
 short of well-ordered conduct, and complete self- 
 control could meet his approval. Crowded with 
 work as his own days always were, he recorded in 
 the sonnet named Mezzo Cammin the deep regret 
 that half his hfe was gone and that still the aspira- 
 tion of his youth to build some tower of song with 
 lofty parapet was unfulfilled. Nor, to his mind, 
 could old age justly feel that it had earned the 
 right to rest entirely from its labors, offering excuse 
 in the thought that the night is come and that it is 
 no longer day. To any who would give such reason 
 for inactivity he spoke in Morituri Salviamus the 
 stern, yet not the less inspiriting rebuke, — 
 
 " The night hath not yet come; we are not quite 
 Cut off from labor by the failing light; 
 Something remains for us to do or dare; 
 Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear; 
 
 " For age is opportunity no less 
 Than youth itself, though in another dress; 
 And as the evening twihght fades away, 
 The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." 
 
 Believing that man's chief duty from childhood 
 to old age is to strive without ceasing after the 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 129 
 
 highest good, Longfellow had little sympathy with 
 those who would undertake to compromise with 
 evil. He found, it is true, a certain poetic pleasure 
 in the quaint thought that since Lucifer is permitted 
 to live, he must therefore in a sense be God's 
 minister working for some Good not understood by 
 man; but he did not really believe in the existence 
 of a personal devil, laying seige to the heart of man 
 and tempting him to sin. Rather holding with 
 Saint James that we are drawn away and enticed 
 by our own desires, Longfellow recast in The 
 Golden Legend a part of that apostle's message in 
 the words, 
 
 " Our lusts and passions are the downward stair 
 That leads the soul from a diviner air." 
 
 Again, Longfellow may have been pleased to fancy 
 that the memorial of a righteous act is imme- 
 diately registered in heaven, but that the book 
 wherein our evil deeds are written remains open for 
 a time, that by repentance and prayer we may erase 
 the records from its pages; yet he had no patience 
 with those who like JuUa, in the drama of Michael 
 Angela — 
 
 " Would clothe the soul with all the Christian graces, 
 Yet not despoil the body of its gauds; 
 Would feed the soul with spiritual food, 
 Yet not deprive the body of its feasts; 
 Would seem angeUc in the sight of God, 
 Yet not too saintlike in the eyes of man; 
 In short would lead a holy Christian hf e 
 In such a way that even one's nearest friend 
 Would not detect them in one circumstance 
 To show a change from what it was before." 
 
130 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 This arraignment of one who would find a path 
 however narrow between the material and the 
 spiritual world, of one who would feast at once 
 upon the fleshpots of Egypt and the manna sent 
 down from Heaven, was the method chosen by 
 Longfellow to teach the lesson that Christianity, 
 if it is to be worth anything at all, must be first 
 and foremost truly practical. To his mind, the 
 Christian like the tree in the parable is known by 
 its fruits, — the followers of Christ are to be 
 adjudged profitable or unprofitable servants ac- 
 cording as they are true doers or mere hearers of the 
 words of their Master. 
 
 In the last analysis, the essence of Christ's 
 teaching is love. Although hope is repeatedly 
 enjoined upon us by the Scriptures, and although 
 we are told more than once that if we have faith 
 even as a grain of mustard, we have but to com- 
 mand and mountains shall be removed, yet is it 
 not made plain that it is not so much the power 
 springing from hope and faith which we are to 
 cultivate, as that arising from love? The Law and 
 the Prophets, it is pointed out, hang upon just two 
 commandments, that we love the Lord with heart 
 and soul and mind, and that we love our neighbors 
 as ourselves. Still, between these two command- 
 ments there seems to be a difference in degree, since 
 the beloved disciple felt called upon to ask, in his 
 letter addressed to the Church at large, if a man 
 loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
 he love God whom he hath not seen? This doc- 
 trine both in the emphasis laid upon the surpassing 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 131 
 
 value of love and in the accent placed upon the 
 need of making love a practical element in one's 
 association with one's fellows, Longfellow saw fit to 
 present repeatedly. Disseminated through several 
 poems, it is gathered into a single stanza near the 
 close of Tegner's Drapa, but is more beautifully 
 expressed, no doubt, in one of the Tales of the 
 Wayside Inn. 
 
 " The reign of violence is dead, 
 Or dying surely from the world; 
 While Love triumphant reigns instead, 
 And in a brighter sky o'erhead 
 Its blessed banners are unfurled. 
 
 " Not to one chiuch alone, but,seven 
 The voice prophetic spake from heaven; 
 And unto each the promise came, 
 Diversified, but stUl the same." 
 
 In these words Longfellow gave expression to his 
 understanding of Christ's frequently inculcated 
 lesson of Love. Elsewhere it showed other aspects. 
 It appeared as indignant pity throughout the 
 volume called Poems on Slavery, as sympathetic 
 freedom from prejudice in The Jewish Cemetery at 
 Newport, as tenderness and humihty in Helen of 
 Tyre, and as discerning hberality in The Saga of 
 King Olaf. Love, the reflective reader soon 
 perceives, is the great principle underlying the 
 whole of Longfellow's thought. Like faith, it 
 was to him an evidence of things unseen. Through 
 it he became as one of those whose creed is, not a 
 dead formula of words, but a daily living in the 
 
132 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 spirit -of Christ. Of such, with nothing less than 
 inspiration, he wrote in one of the interludes of 
 the Tales of a Wayside Inn, — 
 
 " The passing of their beautiful feet 
 Blesses the pavement of the street, 
 And all their looks and words repeat 
 Old Fuller's saying, wise and sweet. 
 Not as a vulture, but a dove. 
 The Holy Ghost came from above." 
 
 Longfellow's beUef that love should be the adjust- 
 ing force of our daily conduct not only gave him 
 peace in his outlook upon life, but made him pecu- 
 harly serene in his contemplation of death. That 
 he grieved deeply over the loss of those whom he 
 loved is plainly evident in such poems as Footsteps 
 of Angels, The Cross of Snow, The Chamber over the 
 Gate, and Three Friends of Mine; yet never did he 
 sorrow as those who have no hope. Even in the 
 earliest hours of separation from one of his children, 
 he could write in Resignation, — 
 
 " There is no Death! What seems so is transition; 
 This life of mortal breath 
 Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, 
 Whose portal we call Death." 
 
 His daughter was not dead, she had but gone into a 
 larger school where Christ himself would be her 
 teacher; his friend, Parker Cleaveland, although he 
 slept, had none the less awakened, since God had 
 said Amen! Members of the companions of his 
 early life had been carried one by one to their 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 133 
 
 graves, yet he thought of them, not as buried, but 
 as joined to that other band of hving " called mis- 
 takenly the dead " ; Bayard Taylor lay at rest 
 among his books, but in some realm, some planet, 
 some star, some vast serial space, he walked in 
 peaceful gardens of delight. Palfrey and Agassiz, 
 Hawthorne and Sumner had forgotten the pathway 
 to the poet's door, had left him with the sense that 
 something unreplaceable was gone from nature, 
 that summer was not summer, nor could be, since 
 they died; yet his trust remained unshaken and he 
 found strength to say in Auf Wiedersehen, — 
 
 " It were a double grief, if the true-hearted, . 
 Who loved us here, should on the farther shore 
 Remember us no more. 
 
 " BeUeving, in the midst of our aflBictions, 
 That death is a beginning, not an end. 
 
 We call to them, and send 
 Farewells, that better might be called predictions. 
 Being fore-shadowings of the future, thrown 
 
 Into the vast unknown. 
 
 Faith overleaps the confines of our reason, 
 And if by faith, as in old times was said. 
 
 Women received their dead 
 Kaised up to life, then only for a season 
 Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain 
 
 Until we meet again! " 
 
 Men who like Prince Henry in the Christus hold 
 tenaciously to earth, may regard the thought of 
 death with terror; others who think of a book in 
 which are written our failings, faults, and evils. 
 
134 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 our secret sins, shortcomings and despair, may 
 shudder in fear; but Longfellow, believing that 
 they who live the life of the spirit now shall con- 
 tinue to hve that life hereafter, had no such dread. 
 To him as to his heroine Elsie in The Golden 
 Legend, the grave was but a covered bridge leading 
 from Ught to light through a brief darkness. At 
 one time, he likened death to the hfting of a latch; 
 at another, to the chillness which precedes the 
 dawn, wherein we shudder for a moment ere we 
 waken in the broad sunshine of the other life; at 
 still another, to the stepping forth into the open 
 air from a tent already luminous with light shining 
 through its transparent waUs. In Longfellow's 
 vision, only upon those who live unworthily does 
 Death descend as a relentless archer cruel and swift. 
 At times, it is true. Death to the poet, took on the 
 form of an unexpected guest who waiting for no 
 man's leisure, steps in unasked and unannounced 
 to put a stop to all our occupations and designs; 
 but he presents himself more vividly, now as the 
 Driver of the ploughshare in whose furrow we are 
 sown; now as the Reaper who reaps the bearded 
 grain at a breath and the flowers that grow between; 
 and now as the Angel of the amaranthine wreath, 
 descending to whisper with a breath divine the 
 summons to the state of perfect peace. 
 
 Dead, in the language of every day life, our 
 friends may be, but the poet can think of them as 
 never dying. Not only does the Hght which a 
 great man like Sumner leaves behind him lie for 
 years upon the path of men; not only does the city 
 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 135 
 
 of Nuremberg seem famous because Durer once 
 trod its pavements, once breathed its air; not only 
 do the passion and pain of hearts that long have 
 ceased to beat remain to throb in hearts that are or 
 are to be; but to Longfellow the soul of every 
 man itself lives on, a conscious personaUty existent 
 in some other sphere of activity than this material 
 world. Though it has forever gone from us who 
 yet remain in the flesh, it has but moved a-httle 
 nearer " to the Master of aU music, to the Master of 
 all singing." So beheving, Longfellow placed his 
 own conviction upon the lips of Preciosa in The 
 Spanish Student when he caused her to answer her 
 own question why she should fear death, with the 
 thought that to die is to leave all disappointment, 
 care, and sorrow; all ignominy, suffering and 
 despair, and be at rest forever. StiU Longfellow's 
 attitude towards death was something far greater 
 than a reconcihation to an inevitable change, some- 
 thing far more courageous than a willingness to 
 accept one's fate, something far more manly than 
 a giving way to longing for the rest which takes the 
 place of the painful activity of our present life. 
 From the beginning to the end of Longfellow's 
 career, life to him was real, was earnest, — death 
 was anything but the goal. The manly heroism 
 of Browning's Prospice, the dauntless fortitude of 
 Tennyson's Silent Voices were not wanting in the 
 American poet. He too, as his Victor and Van- 
 quished plainly shows, would make a final stand, 
 he too would meet the last enemy of mankind in 
 courageous, yes, in conquering strife, 
 
136 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " As one who long hath fled with panting breath 
 Before his foe, bleeding and near to fall, 
 I turn and set my back against the wall. 
 
 And look thee in the face, triumphant Death. 
 
 I caU for aid, and no one answereth; 
 I am alone with thee, who conquerest all; 
 Yet me thy threatening form doth not appall. 
 
 For thou art but a phantom and a wraith. — 
 
 Wounded and weak, sword broken at the hilt. 
 With armor shattered, and without a shield, 
 
 I stand immoved; do with me what thou wilt; 
 I can resist no more, but will not yield. 
 
 This is no tournament where cowards tilt; 
 The vanquished here is victor of the field." 
 
VII 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 The poetry of Holmes is far from being the most 
 important product of his genius. Although in 
 amount it exceeds that of either Bryant, Poe, or 
 Emerson, it consists so largely of the kind of verse 
 termed " occasional " that it presents but a slender 
 sheaf of songs having any likelihood of attaining 
 immortality. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, 
 it may quite fearlessly be asserted, is a real con- 
 tribution to permanent literature; but the genial 
 humor which gives that prose work enduring 
 vitality fails, though present, to perform the same 
 service for its author's poetry. Holmes, it is true, 
 was so facile as a versifier and so ready as a wit, 
 that for more than half a century he was called 
 upon to be poet at nearly every important public 
 meeting in Boston, and at not a few elsewhere. 
 The same characteristics, moreover, made him 
 peculiarly and uniformly successful as a writer 
 of parodies, mock-heroics, and vers-de-sodete; for, 
 copious as all his work of this kind was, the sponta- 
 neous humor which permeated it never by any 
 chance degenerated in quaUty or gave the impres- 
 sion of being forced. Nevertheless, well-known as 
 Holmes became as an occasional poet and humorist, 
 he could not, any more than any other author, 
 gain thereby lasting renown. Many a poem which 
 
138 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 at the time of its delivery under specially favorable 
 circumstances seems hardly less than inspired, 
 often becomes quite commonplace when there is 
 a change of environment, or after years have passed 
 away. Moreover, as Holmes himself admitted in 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfastr-table, it is a dangerous 
 thing for a literary man to indulge his love for 
 the ridiculous, since his readers laugh with him as 
 long as he amuses them, but, most likely, at him 
 when he attempts to be serious. 
 
 Holmes, however, did dare to run the risk of 
 being so laughed at, and for his courage received 
 his due reward. Scattered here and there among 
 his occasional and his humorous verses are many 
 noble poems which, written beyond a doubt in the 
 hope that they would be read with all seriousness, 
 have not failed of a sympathetic audience. Al- 
 though it must be admitted that a few of these 
 pieces are, from the point of view of the present 
 day, somewhat over-sentimental in the manner of 
 Hood and Moore, and for that reason old-fashioned, 
 it cannot be denied that many others, through their 
 quaint simpUcity and obvious sincerity, are unfor- 
 gettable. Old Ironsides is a permanent contribu- 
 tion to the hterature of America; The Last Leaf, 
 after four-score years of existence is still remarkable 
 for its exquisite mingUng of humor and pathos; 
 The Voiceless and Under the Violets have not 
 become incapable of making misty the eyes of the 
 reader; Love Divine and Lord of All Being! 
 Throned Afar, are printed in the hymn-books of 
 nearly every creed, and are sung in nearly every 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 139 
 
 church where the English language is known. 
 And The Boys, written half a century ago for an 
 anniversary of the members of Hoknes's own class 
 in Harvard, still lays hold upon the heart-strings 
 of every man who at any time has been a college 
 student. The even-flowing humor of the poem 
 catches and holds the attention of the reader, not 
 by its fun alone, but by its restraint. Then while 
 the Ups are still curved by the smile which the 
 whimsical turns in the thought awaken, the very 
 soul is stirred by the all but incomparable ending, — 
 
 " And when we have done with our life-lasting toys. 
 Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys! " 
 
 This prayer which Holmes placed at the close of 
 a poem written when he was well on in middle hfe, 
 was no conventional formula of words or belief. 
 It was a sincere appeal to a Being who hears and 
 answers the petitions of His children. It must be 
 admitted, however, that Holmes could not have so 
 expressed himself in the first decades of his career. 
 The conception of God which the poet held in 
 1859 was not that of his early manhood, but was 
 rather the result of an evolution in thought. Not 
 even in the most serious of his early poems did he 
 anywhere mention God under any name whatever, 
 and the few scattering allusions which he made to 
 angels, to Eden, to the Virgin Mary, or to Saint 
 Genevieve cannot be regarded as anything more 
 than ornamental additions to his verse. In Poetry, 
 a metrical essay delivered before the Phi Beta 
 Kappa Society of Harvard University in 1836, he 
 
140 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 spoke, it is true, of God as the Maker of all things, 
 and later on, in the same poem, he even included 
 the truly poetic lines — 
 
 " Yet Faith's pure hymn, beneath its shelter rude, 
 Breathes out as sweetly to the tangled wood 
 As when the rays through pictured glories pour 
 On marble shaft and tessellated floor; — 
 Heaven asks no surplice round the heart that feels, 
 And all is holy where devotion kneels." 
 
 Religiously satisfactory, of course, this passage is, 
 yet it indicates nothing more than a single forward 
 step from the author's early position. Certainly 
 it cannot be safely quoted as being undoubtedly 
 theistic, nor can any lines be cited from poems 
 written by Holmes during the next ten years which 
 prove him to be other than a deist in faith and 
 thought. He seems never to have denied the 
 existence of a God endowed with supreme power 
 and intelligence; but it was only after a period of 
 many years that his conception of God as the Crea- 
 tor of the universe, the Master-worker in nature, 
 the Moulder of man, the Director of history was 
 filled out and completed by the idea that He is 
 One whom men may think of as a sympathetic 
 daily Companion, as a Father bending in love 
 above His children. 
 
 At no time in his life could Holmes have been 
 justly called a sceptic in the popular sense of that 
 term. Questioner, however, he undoubtedly was 
 from the beginning of his career to the end. Un- 
 willing to take anything rehgious on trust alone. 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 141 
 
 he never appealed to the Bible as authority al- 
 though he did quote from it extensively. Trained, 
 as he said himself in The School-Boy " to judge 
 men's dogmas by their deeds," he was restless 
 under claims and assertions made in the name of 
 the Church alone, and firmly insisted upon his 
 right to think for himself. That he had charity 
 for all forms of sincere belief, the poem entitled 
 AstrcBa — to mention no other — plainly shows; 
 but for himself he held, as in The Mind's Diet, that 
 
 " No reasoning natures find it safe to feed, 
 For their sole diet, on a single creed." 
 
 He could be patient with men who hke Jonathan 
 Edwards in seeking God have lost their human 
 hearts; he could understand the agony of soul 
 which comes to many when they find that the 
 belief of their childhood is being undermined Ijy 
 doubt; but he none the less felt constrained to ask 
 in The School-Boy, 
 
 " Why should we look one common faith to find, 
 When one in every score is color-blind? 
 If here on earth they know not red from green, 
 Will they see better into things unseen! " 
 
 In establishing his own faith Holmes drew some- 
 what from Nature, somewhat from History, test- 
 ing and refining all that he regarded as ore by pass- 
 ing it through the fires of his own unusually keen 
 and sane intellect. Yet if Holmes uniformly held 
 that his religious belief must have the approval of 
 his head as well as of his heart, he never fell into 
 the error of assuming that the human mind is the 
 
142 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 final measure of all truth. How plainly he saw 
 that the wisdom of God transcends the intelli- 
 gence of man, one may read in the concluding lines 
 of the poem called Our Limitations: — 
 
 " Eternal Truth! beyond our hopes and fears, 
 Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres! 
 From age to age, while History carves sublime 
 On her waste rook the flaming curves of time. 
 How the wild swajdngs of our planet show 
 That worlds unseen surround the world we know." 
 
 Convinced that the realms of truth stretch far 
 beyond the ken of human understanding. Holmes 
 could easily say in The Old Player that Truth — 
 that is, final Truth — is for other spheres, and Hope 
 for this; and could readily speak pityingly, though 
 quite uncontemptuously, in Terpsichore, of those 
 who will not learn that in this lower world some 
 doubts must darken faith and trust. Still, Holmes 
 would have been the last to admit that the truth 
 which the mind of man is capable of perceiving, 
 is always relative and never by any possibility 
 absolute. Exclaim though he did in Wind Clouds^ 
 and Star Drifts, — 
 
 " Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth 
 That heroes fought for, martyrs died to save, 
 Reveals the earth-born lineage, growing old 
 And limping on its march, its wings unplumed. 
 Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream! " 
 
 he yet clung tenaciously to his confident trust that 
 man made in the image of God gains from time to 
 time, as the centuries go by, a firm and unques- 
 tionable footing. Again and again his unshakable 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 143 
 
 beKef that Truth is the guiding star of life reas- 
 serted itself in his poetry — Truth bound by no 
 rusted chain which the past has forged, Truth so 
 untrammelled that Faith, as he remarked in The 
 School-Boy, must smile to find her sister free. 
 Freedom of thought indeed was to Holmes but 
 little less than a passion. In one of his sonnets 
 read before the New York Harvard Club, he makes 
 it clear that he felt our eldest sire did well when at 
 the beginning of his search for truth, he stretched 
 forth his hand and laid hold upon the forbidden 
 bough. He glories in the fact that Veritas is boldly 
 inscribed upon the portals of the foremost seat of 
 learning in the land, that no church can bind his 
 much loved Harvard College in bonds of human 
 creed. To him Truth, heaven-born Truth, for 
 which the saint has Uved, the hero died, is 
 
 " The mighty -word that upward leads 
 Through noble thought to nobler deeds — 
 Truth — the one word that makes a slave a man! " 
 
 The reader, it must be admitted, searches in 
 vain through the poems of Holmes to discover 
 anything beyond the faintest outline of a creed. 
 The Holy Spirit is not mentioned above once or 
 twice, and the allusions to Jesus are rare. Though 
 the Son of Mary is now and then called the Master, 
 he is never spoken of as the Christ in the noblest 
 sense of that term. The Mother's Secret, a marvel- 
 ously sympathetic study of the mind of the Virgin, 
 evidently imphes that all that was divinely wonder- 
 ful in the holy life of the Nazarene was but a sacred 
 
144 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 legend. Even the fine use made of the story of 
 Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, in the lines written 
 in memory of Charles Upham, hardly suggests 
 that Holmes regarded the Biblical narrative as 
 true. For him the theories of the Incarnation and 
 the Atonement had apparently no attraction; and 
 if he dwelt in thought at all upon the Resurrection 
 and the Ascension, he sought for what might be 
 called the basic principle underlying a devout 
 myth. He was far from wilhng to brush ruthlessly 
 away the accumulation of years of religious con- 
 templation and beUef; yet he felt that the time 
 had come for a readjustment, a restatement of 
 theological conceptions. How Uttle arrogant his 
 attitude was, however, may best be learned from 
 the single stanza written to be read at the Uni- 
 tarian Festival held on March 8, 1882. 
 
 " The waves unbuild the wasting shore; 
 
 Where mountains towered, the billows sweep, 
 Yet still their borrowed spoils restore. 
 
 And build new empires from the deep. 
 So while the floods of thought lay waste 
 
 The proud domain of priestly creeds, 
 Its heaven-appointed tides will haste 
 
 To plant new homes for himian needs. 
 Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled 
 
 The change an outworn chiirch deplores; 
 The legend sinks, but Faith shall build 
 
 A fairer throne on new found shores." 
 
 One may readily gather from these lines that 
 Holmes was far from creedless in thought, however 
 much he seemed so in word. In The Autocrat 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 145 
 
 of the Breakfast-table, indeed, he had said, " I 
 have a creed — none better and none shorter. 
 It is told in two words — the first two of the Pater 
 Noster. And when I say these words, I mean 
 them." The words " Our Father," then expressed 
 the beUef of Hohnes in its lowest terms; somewhat 
 enlarged it might have been exactly formulated 
 in Christ's well-known summary of the Law and 
 the Prophets; stUl further detailed, it would have 
 presented three tenets as unquestionable: God is 
 Love; Charity never faileth; and this mortahty 
 shall put on inamortality. 
 
 Holmes after having once come to the conclu- 
 sion that he could honestly use the words, God is 
 Love, seems never to have wearied in re-iterating 
 the thought which they express. It appears 
 almost hke a formula in Astrcea and in Tartarus; 
 it is strongly implied in The Word of Promise and 
 in Wind Clouds and Star Drifts; it is developed at 
 large in The Crooked Footpath and in the Hymn of 
 Trust. It is not too much to say, indeed, that 
 Holmes succeeded far better than Bryant or 
 Emerson, Whittier, or Longfellow in making the 
 Companionship of God a living fact. To him God 
 is a patient and long-suffering Father eagerly 
 awaiting the time when we shall know Him as He 
 is. In striving after Him, we have, according to 
 Holmes in Wind Clouds and Star Drifts, far too 
 frequently worshipped idols of our own making, 
 brutal deities possessed of not a single divine 
 attribute, fooHsh conceptions but too plainly 
 betraying their human origin; nevertheless, de- 
 
146 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 spite our errors, wilful or mistaken though they 
 may be, God is still the Father of His nursery- 
 brood, smiling perhaps to see us with the toys we 
 call by sacred names and idly feign to be what we 
 call them. Plainly the loving Fatherhood of God is 
 the dominating idea of Holmes's religious thought. 
 God, he pointed out in Manhood, must be truer 
 than the truest friend, more tender than a woman's 
 love, a Father, indeed, who is better than the best 
 of sires and kinder than the kindest mother ever 
 I known. It is this conviction which underlies the 
 Hymn of Trust, perhaps the most thoroughly 
 satisfying sacred lyric written by an American 
 author, 
 
 " O Love Divine, that stooped to share 
 Our sharpest pang, oiir bitterest tear. 
 On Thee we cast each earth-bom care, 
 We smile at pain while Thou art near! 
 
 " Though long the weary way we tread. 
 And sorrow crown each Ungering year, 
 No path we shun, no darkness dread, 
 
 Our hearts stiU whispering. Thou, art near! 
 
 " When drooping pleasure turns to grief. 
 And trembling faith is changed to fear. 
 The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf, 
 Shall softly tell us, Thou art near! 
 
 " On Thee we fling oin- burdening woe, 
 O Love Divine, forever dear. 
 Content to suffer, while we know. 
 Living and dying. Thou art near!" 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 147 
 
 The conviction that God is a loving Father 
 dwelling so near us that in Him we indeed Hve and 
 move and have our being, frequently led Holmes 
 to express in the forms of verse his prayers of 
 thanksgiving, trust, and praise. Nor, if we may 
 judge from the number of petitions which in his 
 poems he addressed to his Heavenly Father, did he 
 doubt that God may hear and answer the cries of 
 His children. True, Holmes struggled as every 
 man must struggle with the problem of why God at 
 times seems wholly indifferent to our needs; yet 
 he never took the stand that the prayer of petition 
 is wasted breath, neither did he assert that a man's 
 prayerful utterance of desire, frequently led to his 
 continuing his strife with such confidence that 
 through himself and through himself alone he 
 gained what he sought. Occasionally Holmes 
 checked rising doubt by concluding that the ways 
 of God are past finding out; more frequently 
 he kept his faith stable by remembering that when 
 God does not grant the very thing for which we 
 beg. He often substitutes another gift which proves 
 in time to be a greater blessing than any we have 
 dared ask. 
 
 In his evaluation of prayer, Hohnes comes to no 
 estimate essentially different from that reached by 
 numbers of other men. He could have had but 
 Mttle sympathy with those who would bargain with 
 the Lord, as we are told indeed did certain Israel- 
 ites of old who promised, if assured of reward, to 
 serve faithfully. Rather must he have been mind- 
 ful of the fact that the founder of Christianity, — 
 
148 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 desiring that not His will but His Father's should 
 be done — asked vainly that the cup of suffering 
 might pass from Him. Some idea of what Holmes 
 thought a prayer should be, may be gathered from 
 that passage in The Professor at the Breakfast- 
 table, descriptive of the scene about the Little 
 Gentleman's deathbed. The example there given 
 of what must be regarded under the circumstance 
 as nothing short of perfect prayer, needs no com- 
 ment; it may be supplemented, however, by the 
 fact that elsewhere — in The Poet of the Breakfast- 
 table — Holmes insisted that above all things the 
 tongue that tells our sorrows and our sins to heaven 
 must represent ourselves, 
 
 " And not that other self which nods and smiles 
 And babbles in our name." 
 
 Clearly it is the behef of Holmes, that sincere 
 earnest prayer is acceptable to our Father in 
 Heaven, than the accomplishment of whose will 
 His faithful children have no other desire. To Him 
 we may address our petitions, sure that what we 
 ask will be given us, if, in His far-reaching right- 
 eousness, the boon we crave is one a God of Love 
 may grant. 
 
 The second tenet of Holmes's rehgious creed — 
 so far as it can be said from a study of his poetry 
 that he had one — was based upon the first; for 
 certainly, if God is Love, Love is of God. In 
 arriving at the point of view that love for one's 
 fellow-man is the prime characteristic of a religion 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 149 
 
 pure and undefiled in the sight of Heaven, Holmes 
 was but following in the footsteps of Saint John who 
 himself had found his guidance in the teachings of 
 One whom he regarded as God incarnate. How 
 close that following was, is clear to any one who 
 will take the trouble to compare the Epistles of the 
 Beloved Disciple as a whole with the thirty-fourth 
 verse of the thirteenth chapter of that same 
 disciple's narrative of the life of his Master. One 
 would have no right to contend, of course, that 
 Holmes presents a striking contrast to other 
 American poets in his acceptance of the teaching, 
 that of the Christian virtues charity is the greatest; 
 yet one may boldly assert that, as he succeeded by 
 some inexplicable means in making the Fatherhood 
 and the Love of God a convincing fact, so without 
 obvious effort he made his readers feel that love of 
 one's neighbor is the essential characteristic of a 
 well-ordered life. In other words. Holmes more 
 than any of his fellow-poets made the two doctrines, 
 the Love of God and the Love of every man for his 
 brother, seem thoroughly practical for all times and 
 seasons, and under all circumstances and onditions. 
 Charity, indeed, in one sense or another was with 
 Holmes an insistent theme. The poem Non- 
 Resistance shows how well its author understood the 
 hearts of those who held what he called the passive 
 creed in an hour when the souls of men grew hot 
 with rage, even while hoping against hope that 
 civil war would not rend the South from the North; 
 The Two Streams is a plea for reservation of judg- 
 ment upon the conduct of our fellows, since we 
 
150 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 cannot know from how slight a cause two brothers 
 may pass 
 
 " From the same cradle's side, 
 
 From the same mother's knee, — 
 One to long darkness and the freezing tide, 
 One to the Peaceful Sea; " 
 
 and The Crooked Footpath bears, though under a 
 different form, the very message of the parable of 
 the mote and the beam. 
 
 " No earth-born will 
 Could even trace a faultless Una; 
 Our truest steps are hxmian still. 
 To walk unswerving were divine! 
 
 " Truants from love, we dream of wrath: — 
 Oh, rather let us trust thee more! 
 Through all the wanderings of the path 
 We still can see ovu* Father's door! " 
 
 Towards all religious sects and beliefs Holmes, 
 liberal though he was, exhibited the broadest 
 sympathy. If in The Moral Bvlly he was justly 
 impatient with the two-faced bigot, as he called 
 one who preached a doctrine that served but to 
 tear " the charter of the shuddering soul," he did 
 not fail to express elsewhere his sincere admiration 
 of the priest who, perplexed by the critic's danger- 
 ous art, could still beat back his doubts and take a 
 firmer stand upon his faith. In A Birthday Tribute, 
 addressed to James Freeman Clarke, the Uni- 
 tarian minister. Holmes himseK a Unitarian in 
 belief, expressed, as might be expected, his im- 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 151 
 
 qualified adherence to the simplest of creeds, 
 "God is over all"; yet passage after passage 
 might be quoted from other poems to show his 
 sympathetic and appreciative understanding of 
 more elaborate forms of faith and order, whether 
 Anglican, Calvinistic, or Roman. Finally it may 
 be pointed out in this connection that probably 
 no other American poet ever made so strong a plea 
 for the Jew. In the poem At the Pantomime Holmes 
 mentioned an instance of that shrinking from the 
 descendants of Abraham which has developed into 
 an instinct with many who profess and call them- 
 selves Christians. Steeling himself at first against 
 his neighbors, — for Holmes told the story as 
 though it were an incident in his own life, — he 
 looked by chance upon the boy beside him to see 
 
 " A fresh young cheek whose olive hue 
 The mantling blood shows faintly through; 
 Locks dark as midnight, that divide 
 And shade the neck on either side; 
 Soft, gentle, loving eyes that gleam 
 Clear as a starlight mountain stream: — 
 So looked that other child of Shem, 
 The Maiden's Boy of Bethlehem! 
 
 " A sudden mist, a watery screen, 
 Dropped hke a veil before the scene; 
 The shadow floated from my soul, 
 ^Jid to my lips a whisper stole. — 
 ' Thy prophets caught the Spirit's flame. 
 From thee the Son of Mary came, 
 With thee the Father deigned to dwell, — 
 Peace be upon thee Israel! ' " 
 
152 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Charity with Holmes by no means reached the 
 end in sympathetic understanding of another's 
 point of view; to him love, like faith to Saint James, 
 if it hath not works, is dead. More than once and 
 in more than one rhetorical figure, Holmes laid 
 stress upon the thought that deeds are the highest 
 form of service. In The Promise he did not hesi- 
 tate to assert that the tears which soothe another's 
 woe have washed the Master's feet; and in The 
 World's Homage, one of two poems addressed to 
 Harriet Beecher Stowe, although admitting that 
 the nun repeating her rosary does well, he goes on 
 to say, — 
 
 " But she who serves the sufferer's needs, 
 Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds, 
 May trust the Lord will count her beads 
 As well as human fingers." 
 
 Again and again in his poetry he pointed out to 
 members of his own medical profession that as the 
 main reward immediately accruing to the physician 
 is the consciousness of having eased a sufferer's 
 pain, of having brought back the smile to lips 
 parched with fever, of having restored light to 
 reason darkened for a time; so the chief recom- 
 pense the future holds will be the hearing of the 
 gracious words, 
 
 " Ye served your brother, ye have served the Lord." 
 
 Clearly the chief of the Christian virtues reached 
 perfection to Holmes's mind only in becoming 
 practical; true charity he felt goeth about doing 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 153 
 
 good. Still, of his own work among his fellow-men 
 he thought but humbly — too humbly in fact. 
 Certainly in him Charity did not vaunt itself; 
 neither was it puffed up, nor did it behave itself 
 unseemly. Though he must have known how 
 highly and how widely he was honored as physi- 
 cian, teacher, author, and friend, he took even in 
 his later years but little credit for all that he had 
 accomplished for humanity. The most that his 
 modesty and sincerity would permit him to say 
 for himself at the age of seventy, he recorded in 
 The Iron Gate. There we read, 
 
 " If word of mine another's gloom has brightened, 
 
 Through my dimib lips the heaven-sent message came; 
 If hand of mine another's task has Ughtened, 
 It felt the guidance that it dared not claim.'' 
 
 The third and final article in Holmes's very 
 simple creed was a firm behef in the immortality 
 of the soul. Apparently, however, he came but 
 slowly and only by degrees to the conclusion that 
 he could accept the doctrine as true. In The 
 Cambridge Churchyard written when the author 
 was twenty-seven years of age, the fundamental 
 thought is not more than this: we die, we pass 
 away, and in time we are forgotten. Even in 
 Urania, read ten years later, Holmes could not go 
 much further than to inquire, " Does life's sum- 
 mer see the end of all? " True, in the same poem, 
 he did hasten to admit that rather than give an 
 affirmative and hopeless answer to his question, 
 he would prefer to cherish the Athenian's creed, 
 
154 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 the Moslem's view of paradise, or the Indian's 
 dream of happy hunting grounds, yet neither in 
 Urania, nor in any of Hohnes's poems during the 
 succeeding decade can the reader find a passage 
 expressive of the conviction that the soul survives 
 the body. It may be safe to conclude perhaps, 
 that the attitude of Holmes as a young man can be 
 determined from a study of Wind Clovds and Star- 
 Drifts. Although that poem was not completed 
 until 1872, the young astronomer, its supposed 
 author, may in all probability be regarded as giving 
 voice to thoughts which years before had been those 
 of Holmes himself. The young scientist quite 
 ignored the question of the persistence of the soul 
 after death, plainly because he had no convictions 
 to express. At first, indeed, he was eager that his 
 name might be linked throughout the unmemorial 
 years with some unforgettable discovery; yet after 
 a time, he was content to think of himseK as becom- 
 ing wholly unknown to mankind, if his work might 
 but continue forever. 
 
 The behef that a man's work may be immortal, 
 though he himself may whoUy die, cannot long 
 satisfy the heart, cannot completely stiU the long- 
 ing for a continuance of personal consciousness after 
 death. The pathos of the lines written in memory 
 of James Button Russell, 
 
 " I only knew he loved me well, 
 He loved me — and is gone! " 
 
 is the greater, because they contain no suggestion, 
 no expression of hope that love persists forever. 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 155 
 
 Neither do memory and imagination, work to- 
 gether as they will to make the dead seem near, 
 succeed in producing lasting satisfaction. Heart 
 and brain both reach out to touch something more 
 tangible — if the word will be allowed — than 
 anything which the fancy can create. Insist as 
 Holmes did at the several meetings of his class- 
 mates that the fifty-eight of the class of '29 were 
 all together, that at the side of every chair a shadow 
 hovered, that the dead seemed listening as of old, 
 he was enabled to utter such a thought year after 
 year " as each dear companion dropped smiling 
 away," only because he had learned to say, as in 
 A Poem written for the dedication of the Pittsfield' 
 Cemetery; — 
 
 " Take them, O Father, in immortal trust! 
 Ashes to ashes, dust to kindred dust 
 Till the last angel roUs the stone away. 
 And a new morning brings eternal day! " 
 
 Death, as Holmes once fancifully said, may indeed 
 be the stern Landlord whom at length we must all 
 obey; 
 
 " And earth's brown cUnging lips may press 
 The long cold kiss that waits us all; " 
 
 yet the certainty of life eternal is behind the Mnes 
 entitled In Memory of Charles Upham and addressed 
 to his mother, 
 
 " O Mary! one who bore thy name. 
 
 Whose Friend and Master was divine, 
 Sat waiting silent tiU He came, 
 Bowed down in speechless grief like thine. 
 
156 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Where have ye laid him? ' 'Come,' they say, 
 
 Pointing to where the loved one slept; 
 Weeping, the sister led the way — 
 And, seeing Mary, ' Jesus wept.' 
 
 " He weeps with thee, with all that mourn. 
 And He shall wipe thy streaming eyes. 
 Who knew all sorrows, woman-bom — 
 Trust in His word; thy dead shall rise! " 
 
 Manifestly, death in the opinion of the maturer 
 Hohnes, is not the end of life. Even in his con- 
 templation of the distant period when all the hosts 
 of heaven shall be dissolved, when the heavens 
 shall be rolled together as a scroll and every moun- 
 tain and island moved out of their places, he 
 quaintly thought of the beginning of that inevitable 
 cataclysm as the dawning of the great commence- 
 ment day on every sea and shore, when all mankind 
 shall be summoned to the taking of their last 
 degree. If at times he wavered in his certainty 
 that the soul hves forever, he could not give up his 
 hope that death would act the part of the Prompter 
 and call us, even though the curtain fall upon the 
 drama of life, to fairer scenes and brighter day. 
 The same thought was in his mind, though he used 
 another figure, when he wrote in memory of James 
 Russell Lowell, 
 
 " Thou shouldst have sung the swan-song for the choir 
 That filled our groves with music tiU the day 
 Lit the last hilltop with its reddening fire, 
 And evening Ustened for thy lingering lay. 
 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 157 
 
 " But thou hast found thy voice in reahns afar 
 
 Where strains celestial blend their notes with thine; 
 Some cloudless sphere beneath a happier star 
 Welcomes the bright-winged spirit we resign." 
 
 Such conscious immortality Holmes felt to be the 
 only fitting outcome of the life which he knew 
 Lowell had led. Indeed to Holmes, life, if one 
 Uve it worthily, was, in a very large and noble 
 sense, but the portal to a grander home. He 
 looked with sympathetic pity upon what he 
 termed Burns's "life of wasteful self-surrender"; 
 he saw clearly, as he showed plainly in Sun and 
 Shadow, that each man must work out his own 
 salvation without regard to what others think. 
 In the strangely beautiful poem The Living Temple, 
 he contemplated the human body as a cathedral 
 in which man prepares himself to take on a heav- 
 enly form; and in The Chambered Nautilus, he 
 urged, he still urges, — for his works live after 
 him — the soul to build itself more stately man- 
 sions year by year until it may at length depart, 
 leaving its outgrown shell by life's unresting sea. 
 Unwavering trust indeed was his when he looked 
 out from his pinnacle of more than ninety years. 
 Well might he so look forward, since for him, no 
 less than for Whittier to whom he addressed the 
 words — since for him, no less than for all men 
 who have fought the good fight, 
 
 " Brighter than earth's morning ray- 
 Streams the pure light of Heaven's unsetting sun, 
 The unclouded dawn of life's immortal day! " 
 
VIII 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 Lowell, because he was like Holmes, a humorist, 
 has sometimes failed of the recognition which he 
 deserves. He has indeed been occasionally passed 
 over more Ughtly than his fellow-poet, on the score 
 that Holmes, however sparkhng he might have 
 been at times, was always self -restrained; whereas 
 Lowell, on the contrary, not infrequently let his 
 wit run riot. Be that as it may, under the suc- 
 cession of puns that rollic through A Fable for Critics, 
 and beneath the whimsical pedantry of the Rever- 
 end Homer Wilbur and the ridiculous illiteracy 
 of Hosea Biglow in The Biglow Papers, there 
 is a substratum of firm common-sense which 
 shows Lowell, despite his fun, to have been well 
 endowed with breadth and sanity. The rejection 
 of every humorous line written by him, it might 
 be added, would yet leave us a body of serious 
 poems hardly less extensive, certainly not less 
 important than that furnished by Bryant or 
 Emerson. The humorous poems of Lowell, more- 
 over, are so sharply distinguished from his graver 
 work that they may be set aside much more easUy 
 than can the similar work of Holmes, whose genial 
 whimsicalities must be regarded as integral to his 
 presentation of his conception of the life of man, 
 
James Russell Lowell 159 
 
 and possibly even to that of his view of the relation 
 of man to God. Still further, the earlier poems of 
 Lowell, unlike those of Holmes, were aU so de- 
 cidedly serious in tone, and dealt in such way and 
 to such an extent with the foundations of religious 
 faith, that one finds in Lowell's work not a growth 
 or an evolution as in Holmes's, but rather a steady 
 advancement to clearer definition. 
 
 The lines which chronologically stand first in 
 the collected poems of Lowell are entitled Threno- 
 dia, those which hold the last place bear the head- 
 ing, On a Bust of General Grant. The earlier poem, 
 although it ends in a conventional and perfunc- 
 tory intimation of immortality, cannot be regarded 
 as more than a skillful expression of sympathetic 
 understanding of a mother's grief over the loss of 
 her child; the other, it is true, does not in itself 
 contain a single word suggestive of a belief in 
 eternal life, yet its tone is so nearly that of numerous 
 alUed poems — such as Kossuth, To Lamartine, 
 Under the Old Elm, and the Ode Recited atthe Harvard 
 Commemoration — that the reader immediately 
 thinks of LoweU as reaUy predicting for Grant 
 that enduring influence for good which he before 
 asserted of the heroes of other nations and of our 
 own Washington and Lincoln. Between the writ- 
 ings of these two poems, a period of more than half 
 a century intervened, and in that time Lowell 
 repeatedly struggled with the great problem of the 
 immortality of the soul. Unfortunately, he never 
 reached a solution permanently satisfying to 
 himself. His poems plainly show that he would 
 
160 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 gladly have accepted the teachings of Christianity 
 in the matter, yet for some reason he seemed to 
 have been incapable of the act of faith at this 
 point, and consequently only at intervals to have 
 looked upon the persistence of personal conscious- 
 ness after death as a real possibility. 
 
 Lowell, in his attitude towards the doctrine of 
 eternal hfe, then, may be regarded as a sceptic, 
 always, of course, in the better sense of the term. 
 Unable to accept, he doubted; but he would not 
 deny. He had, indeed, the feehng for immortaUty, 
 and he repeatedly sought for a definition that could 
 be as satisfactory to his intellect as the idea was 
 pleasing to his heart. In Rosaline and in A Re- 
 quiem, both very early in date of composition and 
 both wholly imaginative, he implied that there is 
 much gratification in visualizing the dead as still 
 Uving among those who are yet in the flesh; 
 somewhat later he reiterated the same idea more 
 emphatically and more circumstantially in the 
 Unes entitled On the Death of a Friend's Child; and 
 again, a few months later, he made the thought 
 completely his own in The Changeling, in The 
 First Snowfall, and in She Came and Went, three 
 poems written in memory of his daughter Blanche, 
 whose death was the first sharp grief of Lowell's 
 life. This early theory of the poet's, it must be 
 admitted, is not without force. Surely the dead 
 have not Uved in vain, if they continue to dwell so 
 vividly in the memory that they caU forth the 
 perfection of thought and expression which is 
 found in all three of the poems just mentioned and 
 
James Russell Lowell 161 
 
 lead one to the high cahnuess of resignation which 
 especiaUy marks the last, — 
 
 " As a twig trembles, which a bird 
 
 Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, 
 So is my memory thrilled and stirred; — 
 I only know she came and went. 
 
 " An angel stood and met my gaze, 
 
 Through the low doorway of my tent; 
 The tent is struck, the vision stays; — 
 I only know she came and went. 
 
 " Oh, when the room grows slowly dim. 
 And life's last oil is nearly spent. 
 One gush of light these eyes will brim. 
 Only to think she came and went." 
 
 Lowell himself would not have hesitated to admit 
 that an existence which is wholly objective, — 
 that IS, wholly dependent upon the visuahzing 
 power of vivid memory in the living, — is in no 
 sense immortahty in the Christian sense of the 
 term. Putting the matter concretely, one may 
 freely assert that Lowell plainly perceived as the 
 full implication of his doctrine, that his daughter 
 would completely cease to be when his own mem- 
 ory of her should fail. Of others, however, he 
 could quite safely assume a somewhat longer 
 existence. Those who had done heroic deeds in 
 the building of nations, those who had won the 
 martyr's crown in supporting a worthy cause, 
 would live on through the generations, ever inciting 
 the heart of youth to great and noble deeds. As 
 
162 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 he expressed himself in the Commemoration Ode, 
 he saw that — 
 
 " The single deed, the private sacrifice, 
 So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears, 
 Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes 
 With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years; 
 But that high privilege which makes all men peers. 
 That leap of heart whereby a people rise 
 
 Up to a noble angel's height, 
 And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more 
 bright. 
 
 That swift vaUdity in noble veins. 
 
 Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, 
 
 Of being set on flame 
 By the pure fire that flies all contact base 
 But wraps its chosen with angehe might. 
 
 These are imperishable gains. 
 Sure as the sun, medicinal as Ught, 
 These hold great futures in their lusty reins. 
 And certify to earth a new imperial race." 
 
 Still, the immortality which Lowell in these words 
 predicted for the leaders and for the heroic rank 
 and file of the Civil War and which he elsewhere 
 asserted of Torrey and Channing and Shaw, and 
 which among painters he dared assume of Masaccio, 
 and among hterary men of Hood and of the many 
 teachers of Bacon, is not a conscious immortaUty 
 and for that reason gives no final satisfaction. 
 In time, however, Lowell was led to the larger 
 hope. 
 
 The death of Lowell's daughter Rose in 1850, 
 of his only son Walter within the next two years, 
 and of his wife within the next three, caused a 
 
. James Russell Lowell 163 
 
 cataclysm in the poet's spiritual life. Stunned 
 at first, he eventually built up out of the wrecks a 
 faith which, though often weak and evanescent, 
 nevertheless at intervals gathered strength and 
 thrust itself forward as a reality. How utterly 
 hopeless he was in the first hours of grief may be 
 read in the earliest draft of the fines called After 
 the Burial; how effectually he subdued his soul to 
 patient hopefulness is recorded in Palinode. Even ' 
 with the loss of his daughter fresh in mind, Lowell 
 in forwarding a copy of the first poem to a friend 
 attempted to soften its harshness as a reply to a 
 letter of well-meant sympathy by remarking: 
 " Death is a private tutor. We have no fellow- 
 scholars and must lay our lessons to heart alone." 
 These half-apologetic words, however, cannot 
 obscure the distinct agony of soul which, fermenting 
 within him, led him to write, 
 
 " Your logic, my friend, is perfect, 
 Your moral most drearily true; 
 But siace the earth dashed on her coffin, 
 I keep hearing that, and not you. 
 
 " Communion in spirit! Forgive me. 
 But I, who am earthly and weak. 
 Would give all my incomes from dreamland 
 For a touch of her hand on my cheek. 
 
 " That Uttle shoe in the corner, 
 
 So worn and wrinkled and brown. 
 With its emptiness confutes you. 
 And argues your wisdom down." 
 
 We may well contrast with this bitterness of spirit 
 the calmness which reigns in Palinode. Within a 
 
164 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 few days after the death of his wife, Lowell had 
 written, " I can only hope that when I go through 
 the last door that opens for all of us, I may hear 
 her coming step upon the other side." To that 
 hope he later gave, in the poem just named, a 
 most exquisite, a most tender phrasing. 
 
 " Two watched yon oriole's pendent dome, 
 That now is void, and dank with rain, 
 
 And one, — oh, hope more frail than foam! 
 
 The bird to his deserted home 
 Sings not, — ' Auf wiedersehen! ' 
 
 " The loath gate swings with rusty creak; 
 
 Once, parting then, we played at pain; 
 There came a parting, when the weak 
 And fading lips essayed to speak 
 
 Vainly, — ' Auf vnedersehen! ' 
 
 " Somewhere is comfort, somewhere faith. 
 Though thou in outer dark remain; 
 One sweet sad voice ennobles death. 
 And still, for eighteen centuries saith 
 Softly, — ' Auf wiedersehen! ' 
 
 " If earth another grave must bear. 
 
 Yet heaven hath won a sweeter strain. 
 And something whispers my despair. 
 That, from an orient chamber there. 
 Floats down, 'Auf vnedersehen/ ' 
 
 Lowell's vision of immortality never, even 
 momentarily, became so vivid as Bryant's; seldom 
 indeed was it less vague than Emerson's. Al- 
 though his intense desire for reunion with those 
 whom he had loved and lost, carried him occa- 
 
James Russell Lowell 165 
 
 sionally tp the hope expressed in Palinode, his more 
 general attitude of mind found reflection in the 
 concluding lines of The Wind-Harp: — 
 
 " Then from deep in the past, as seemed to me, 
 
 The strings gathered sorrow and sang forsaken, 
 ' One lover still waits 'neath the green-wood tree, 
 But 'tis dark,' and they shuddered, ' where lieth she 
 
 Dark and cold! Forever must one be taken? ' 
 But I groaned, ' O harp of all ruth bereft. 
 This Scripture is sadder, — ' the other left '! " 
 
 ' There murmured, as if one strove to speak. 
 And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered 
 And faltered among the uncertain chords 
 In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words; 
 At last with themselves they questioned and pondered, 
 
 ' Hereafter? — who knoweth? ' and so they sighed 
 Down the long steps that led to silence and died." 
 
 True, when Lowell gazed round what he called his 
 " hall of portraiture by memory reared," he saw 
 about the faces of his beloved dead " an aureole 
 glow woven of that Ught that rose on Easter 
 morning "; and again when he thought of that 
 famous Swiss-American naturalist for many years 
 his colleague and friend, he became convinced that 
 if God is, the man who had sought so earnestly and 
 devoutly to know Him was sure to be — 
 
 " Somehow, somewhere, imperishable as He, 
 Not with His essence mystically combined, 
 As some high spirits long, but whole and free, 
 A perfected and conscious Agassiz." 
 
 Still, however fervent his longing, Lowell made no 
 attempt to picture the details of the hfe which 
 
166 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 follows the separation of the soul from the body. 
 It cannot b^ maintained that he was in any hour 
 without hope; rather should it be said that at 
 times his vision was clearer than at others. On the 
 whole, the tenderly beautiful lines which, but a few 
 years before his death he wrote at the close oi An 
 Epistle to George William Curtis defines as accu- 
 rately as any definition could be accurate his 
 inmost thought upon the doctrine of immortahty. 
 
 " I muse upon the margin of the sea, 
 Our common pathway to the new To Be, 
 Watching the sails, that lessen more and more. 
 Of good and beautiful embarked before; 
 With bits of wreck I patch the boat shaJl bear 
 Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere, 
 Whose friendly-peopled shore I sometimes see, 
 By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me, 
 Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun. 
 My moorings to the past snap one by one." 
 
 In strong contrast with the vagueness of Lowell's 
 thought upon immortahty stands the vividness of 
 his perceptions of God. He might, according to 
 his mood, accept or question or distrust the doc- 
 trines of eternal life, but never by any chance was 
 there a wavering of his faith in the personaHty and 
 fatherhood of the creator. Like Agassiz, — 
 
 " he had trod 
 Outside the plain old path of God thvs spake, 
 
 But God to him was very God, 
 
 And not a visionary wraith 
 Skulking in murky corners of the mind." 
 
 A-t this certainty, it may be well to point out, 
 Lowell did not arrive by intellectual processes 
 
James Russell Lowell 167 
 
 alone. Convinced that a vast world of spirit 
 spreads beyond what he termed the narrow ring of 
 sense, he wrote in The Footpath, 
 
 " I envy Science not her feat 
 To make a twice-told tale of God; " 
 
 and grew impatient in The Lesson with the man — 
 
 " who takes 
 His consciousness the law to be 
 Of all beyond his ken, and makes 
 God but a bigger kind of Me." 
 
 Still, although plainly apprehending the import of 
 the old time question, "Canst thou by searching find 
 out God?" or that later inquiry of Pilate's, " What is 
 truth? " Lowell ever firmly held that God reveals 
 himself to those who truly wait upon Him. To 
 Lowell 
 
 " Believing that Life's bases rest 
 Beyond the probe of chemic test," 
 
 the world seemed in every sense God's world. 
 In the realm of Nature it was, to Lowell's mind, the 
 merciful AU-Father who sends down the snow; 
 and in the life of man, it was the same Heavenly 
 Being who visits us, now with blessings that we 
 may in some wise become acquainted with His 
 infinite patience, and now with pain that when 
 
 " Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death 
 One after other lift their frowning masks, 
 We may behold the seraph's face behind. 
 All radiant with the glory and the calm 
 Of having looked upon the front of God." 
 
168 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Unwavering as was this faith which Lowell had 
 in God, he was none the less frequently at work 
 strengthening its foundations and adding to its 
 bulwarks. To the challenge presented by the 
 problem of evil, he responded in one of his earliest 
 poems, L' Envoi, that Providence shapes the mystic 
 harmony of right and wrong, working out both His 
 own wisdom and our good, — a reply, to the spirit 
 of which he gave, a decade and a half later, in 
 Villa Franca, the more triumphant form, 
 
 " Darkness is strong and so is Sin, 
 But surely God endures forever! " 
 
 Again both to those who point out that men are 
 never at one time in agreement upon the defini- 
 tion of God and to those who dare assert that the 
 rejection of their creed is eternal death, he presented 
 the parable of Ambrose. It seems that the holy 
 monk in mistaken zeal grew impatient with a youth 
 who maintained that to each and every soul, God in 
 His mercy has allowed his several cloud and pillar 
 of fire. Thereupon the young man filling six 
 vessels with water from a brook turned upon 
 Ambrose with the words, 
 
 " As into these vessels the water I pour, 
 Then shall one hold less and another more, 
 And the water unchanged, in every case, 
 Shall put on the figure of the vase; 
 thou who wouldst xmity make through strife, 
 Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life? 
 
James Russell Lowell 169 
 
 " When Ambrose looked up, he stood alone, 
 The youth and the stream and the vases were gone; 
 But he knew, by a sense of humbled grace, 
 He had talked with an angel face to face. 
 And felt his heart changed inwardly, 
 As he fell on his knees beneath the tree." 
 
 Finally, in this connection, Lowell did not hesitate 
 to admit that since every vision which any man 
 might have of God is that of a human soul, it must 
 at its best be necessarily defective and must 
 therefore as necessarily be constantly changing. 
 This thought indeed was a favorite one with 
 Lowell. It took on an unusually beautiful 
 expression in the opening lines of Rhoecus; it was 
 cast into more rugged form in Anti-Apis; it was 
 almost banteringly presented in Credidimus Jovem 
 Regnare; and, in the terse yet none the less perfect 
 line, 
 
 " Each age must worship its own thought of Grod, " 
 
 it became the key-note of The Cathedral, probably 
 the most remarkable philosophic poem in American 
 Literature. 
 
 God to Lowell, no less than to Saint Paul, was 
 One in whom we live and move and have our being. 
 That we are His offspring, Lowell held quite as 
 firmly as those poets of Greece whom the apostle 
 to the Gentiles quoted approvingly; and that we 
 may feel after Him and find Him since He is not 
 far from any one of us, Lowell could believe as 
 sincerely as did Dionysius the Areopagite, the 
 woman named Damaris, and the other converts 
 
170 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 who listened to a certain memorable address 
 delivered from the midst of Mars Hill. Every 
 nation, Lowell asserted, had its lesson from on 
 high; and each, as he expressed it, was "the 
 Messiah of some central thought for the fulfilment 
 and dehght of Man." One may teach the lesson, 
 that Labor is divine; another. Freedom; and still 
 another, Mind: yet they unite as a chorus in 
 maintaining the thought, grander and nobler than 
 any one of them by itself possesses, that God is 
 open-eyed and just, the happy center and cahn 
 heart of aU. How certain Lowell was of God's 
 abiding love and of His willingness to admit His 
 offspring into intimacy with Him may best be read 
 in the concluding Unes of The Cathedral, — 
 
 " If sometimes I must hear good men debate 
 Of other witness of Thyself than Thou, 
 
 My soul shall not be taken in their snare, 
 To change her inward surety for their doubt 
 Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof: 
 While she can only feel herself through Thee, 
 I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear, 
 Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
 Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed. Thou, 
 Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, 
 Missed in the commonplace of miracle." 
 
 Firm as was Lowell's faith in God, it was not 
 more essentially Christian than was his thought of 
 immortality. Indeed his attitude towards many 
 important reUgious ideas may not unjustly be 
 termed pagan, — nobly pagan of course, for Lowell 
 
James Russell Lowell 171 
 
 may well be associated with those philosophers 
 of the ancient world whom Dean Farrar aptly 
 called " seekers after God." He could not bring 
 himself to feel that the Church and the Bible 
 speak with authority, yet he was far from sneering 
 at the claims of the former or thrusting the latter 
 aside as valueless. On the other hand, although he 
 readily acknowledged the importance of many 
 conclusions reached by science, he could not admit 
 that all truth was in her keeping or even attainable 
 through her methods. Nature, history, and the 
 heart of man, all were his teachers, and to each of 
 them in turn he listened devoutly until there rose 
 within him as there had arisen within the lady 
 described in the poem called Irene, 
 
 " The deep religion of a tranquil heart, 
 Which rests instinctively in Heaven's clear law 
 With a full peace, that never can depart 
 From its own steadfastness." 
 
 In one of his earhest poems. The Beggars, as again 
 in The Nomades written after an interval of twenty 
 years, Lowell made it clear that to his mind Nature 
 is not without power to teach high morality and 
 noble conduct, and to lead the willing soul to God. 
 In Bibliolatries he pointed out that history is not 
 fairly read by those who bow in dust before a book 
 and think the great God is theirs alone. True, 
 he once alluded to the Bible as God's own holy 
 word, and throughout his poetry gave evidence of 
 his minute acquaintance with the contents of the 
 Old and the New Testaments; yet how strongly he 
 
172 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 felt that divine revelation is not recorded in the 
 pages of Scripture alone, but may be read no less 
 clearly elsewhere, is evident in the concluding 
 lines of the poem last named, 
 
 " Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 
 
 And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone; 
 Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it. 
 
 Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
 While swings the sea, while mists the moimtains shroud, 
 While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud. 
 Still at the prophet's feet the nations sit." 
 
 So far as the Church as a source of truth is con- 
 cerned, Lowell, although he commented in the two 
 poems, Letter from Boston and A Fable for Critics, 
 upon the strange inconsistencies in many who 
 profess and call themselves Christians, could not be 
 blind to the no other than miraculous power which 
 that great institution has had upon the soul of man. 
 He might ask the question, " Is old time faith but a 
 spectre now, haunting the soUtude of darkened 
 minds? " yet as he looked upon a woman kneeling 
 at prayer, that question was by a kindher thought 
 rebuked, pleading for whatsoever touches life with 
 upward impulse. Thus he found himself far from 
 certain that science has found the key which relig- 
 ion, once possessing, seems at times to have lost. 
 Sceptical though he was at times, he never ap- 
 proached other than reverently any shrine whatso- 
 ever that " gives the soul a moment's truce of 
 God." Pausing before the cathedral in Chartres, 
 he did indeed ask whether Faith or Fear buUt that 
 
James Russell Lowell 173 
 
 mighty pile, yet he could not be insensible to the 
 message which seemed to issue from the benignant 
 lips of sculptured saints and kings: — 
 
 " Ye come and go incessant, we remain 
 Safe in the hallowed quiet of the past; 
 Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, 
 Of faith so nobly realized as this." 
 
 Of Christ as more than an historic figure we have 
 nothing in the poems of Lowell — or if more, as in 
 A Christmas Carol, and The Vision of Sir Launfal, 
 then no more than the adoption of tradition as 
 material lending itself readily to poetic uses. So 
 permeated, however, is the work of Lowell by the 
 spirit of the teachings of Christ that, though he 
 may appear, though he may indeed be sceptical 
 at times and pagan at others, he yet must be reck- 
 oned with him of whom Jesus said to his disciples, 
 " He who is not against us is for us." Lowell 
 indeed seldom identified Christ with the man of 
 Galilee, rather did he think of Him as the embodi- 
 ment of that simple, yet all-sufficient theory of life 
 which that very man of Galilee taught many 
 centuries ago to the little band who having ears to 
 hear did hear, and having heard did understand. 
 As a result of this vivid realization of the essential 
 teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Lowell arrived at a 
 vision of Christ far more clear than that reached by 
 many who never question the assertions of church 
 or creed. In The Search, in The Miner, and still 
 more strongly in A Parable, Lowell laid stress upon 
 the means whereby the soul of man reaches out 
 
174 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 and touches the hem of the garments of the Lord. 
 The hasty reader may contend that Lowell's 
 discovery that Christ is found less frequently in 
 the cathedral, the palace, or the judgment hall 
 than in the hovels of the very poor, is nothing new. 
 Nor, indeed, can any one assert that it is novel. 
 On the contrary, it is as old as Christianity itself 
 and has been reiterated in countless forms since 
 Jesus himself first stated it in the well-known words, 
 " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of 
 these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." 
 Despite the simpUcity of the doctrine, however, 
 its advancement in nineteen hundred years has 
 been but slow; nor will Lowell's presentation of it 
 much hasten its progress. Nevertheless the fact 
 remains that Lowell more nearly than any other 
 American poet has succeeded, perhaps quite 
 unconsciously to himself, in portraying Christ, 
 not as what He is to many a man, a figure shining 
 dimly from out the past, but as what He is to the 
 few truly faithful, an ever-living, omnipresent 
 personality. 
 
 Though it is far from probable that Lowell ever 
 looked upon Jesus as the Christ, that is, as God 
 incarnate, he evidently regarded His teachings as 
 offering the best possible ideals and the most 
 practical rules for the conduct of life. The second 
 commandment of Jesus, " Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself," took on many forms in 
 Lowell's verse, but never did it suffer change in 
 substance or in spirit. He might say in Love, 
 
James Russell Lowell 175 
 
 " True love is but a humble low-born thing, 
 And hath its food served up in earthen ware; 
 It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand, 
 Through the every-dayness of this work-day world;" 
 
 yet he mpant thereby not to behttle love, rather 
 to exalt it. Love, he admitted, might have no 
 more than a narrow beginning but he did not fail 
 to point out, — 
 
 " That love for one from which there doth not spring 
 Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing." 
 
 So firmly, indeed, did he beUeve in the doctrine of 
 the brotherhood of man that by no other American 
 poet, save Whitman perhaps, was it more insis- 
 tently or more convincingly taught. It underlay 
 his life-long hostility to capital punishment, his 
 fierce denunciation of slavery, his soul-stirring 
 deploration of war. It is hinted at in The Forlorn 
 and The Finding of the Lyre, it is emphasized in 
 Hunger and Cold and The Ghost-Seer, and it is the 
 informing thought in The Heritage and Godminster 
 Chimes. Turn where we may, it shines dimly or 
 brightly on almost every page of Lowell's poetry. 
 Perhaps its most direct, though by no means most 
 poetic presentation, maybe found in The Fatherland, 
 one of Lowell's earliest experiments in verse. The 
 concluding stanzas read: — 
 
 " Where'er a human heart doth wear 
 
 Joy's myrtle-wreath or Sorrow's gyves. 
 Where'er a human spirit strives 
 After a life more true and fair, 
 There is the true man's birthplace grand. 
 His is a world-wide fatherland! 
 
176 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Where'er a single slave doth pine, 
 
 Where'er one man may help another, — 
 Thank God for such a birthright, brother, — 
 
 That spot of earth is thine and mine! 
 
 There is the true man's birthplace grand, 
 
 His is a world-wide fatherland! " 
 
 Lowell's belief that no man's interests can prop- 
 erly be limited to one's immediate family, or to the 
 circle in which one moves socially, or even to the 
 nation of which one is a citizen, but must, if one 
 would reach one's full development, be as far- 
 reaching as the blue heaven itself, is a natural 
 outcome of the principle asserted quite simply in 
 A Fable for Critics, " that man is a moral, ac- 
 countable being." Holding that the responsibili- 
 ties of man when regarded as his brother's keeper, 
 are neither light nor few; and readily accepting as 
 final the saying of Jesus that unto whomsoever 
 much is given, of him shall much be required, 
 Lowell did not hesitate to urge the cultivation of 
 the virtues, or to utter warnings against the seduc- 
 tive lovehness which vice often puts on, or to sound 
 frequent trumpet calls to duty. In The Beggar, 
 he pictured himself as going to the woods to learn 
 steadfastness from the oak, endurance from the 
 granite, serenity from the pine, joyousness from 
 the brook, and modesty from the violet; in Ex- 
 treme Unction, he showed how pitiable the soul 
 becomes when it remorsefully looks back to the 
 loss of innocent or the deliberate rejection of the 
 ideal; in The Sirens, he dwelt upon the subtle 
 enervating charm wherewith the thought of 
 
James Russell Lowell 177 
 
 happiness and ease coaxingly transforms activity 
 into slothfulness and death; and in his sonnets he 
 repeatedly gave expression in one form or another 
 to the exhortation, 
 
 " Be noble! and the nobleness that Uves 
 In other men, sleeping, but never dead, 
 WiU rise in majesty to meet thine own." 
 
 Again in The Parting of the Ways and in The 
 Washers of the Shroud, he laid stress upon the gain 
 which comes from obedience; in Dara and in 
 Mahmood, the Image Breaker, he pointed out how 
 surely humiUty and steadfastness are crowned with 
 reward; in A Parable, in Longing, and in The 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, he made it clear how long 
 abiding are faith, hope, and charity; and in Colum- 
 bus and in Seaweed, he emphasized the satisfaction 
 which in the long run visits those who resting in 
 the Lord, wait patiently upon Him until He giveth 
 them their heart's desire. 
 
 Although in the early poem, Summer Storm, 
 Lowell saw fit to speak of life as a confused noise 
 between two silences, he nevertheless gave evi- 
 dence throughout his work that he beUeved spiritual 
 attainments are secured, not by chance, but only 
 through the conscious self-activity of the soul. 
 Love, he admitted in Rhcecus, is ever merciful and 
 can forgive, but he did not hesitate to add that it 
 has no power to heal blindness of spirit, since the 
 soul alone has power over itself. It is true, no 
 doubt, that 
 
178 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " God's love and man's are of the self-same blood, 
 And He can see that always at the door 
 Of foulest hearts the angel-nature yet 
 Knocks to return and cancel all its debt; " 
 
 it is probably equally true that even in the prison, 
 the slave-hut, and the alleys of sin the divine in 
 human nature is never completely trampled out, 
 yet the great deeds of life are little likely to be 
 accomplished by any soul — 
 
 " But sees visions, knows wrestlings of God with the Will, 
 And has its own Sinais and thunderings still." 
 
 Every man according to Lowell's Above and Below 
 has work to do, whether his place be on the moun- 
 tain height or in the valley land. Life, it is said, 
 in the Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration 
 may be given in many ways: one man with wiser 
 ear may divine amid the battle-din some text of 
 God and find himseK called thereby to front a Ue 
 in arms; another may see no less plainly that 
 loyalty to truth is often sealed " as bravely in the 
 closet as the field, so bountiful is fate." 
 
 Whatever one's walk in life may be, LoweU was 
 quite certain that sooner or later one is called upon 
 to meet a crisis, to make a choice, and in perform- 
 ing that act to hasten or retard the progress of the 
 world. As early as 1844 when America was torn 
 with dissension over the annexation of Texas, 
 Lowell taking in The Present Crisis the side of 
 justice, sounded the warning, — 
 
James Russell Lowell 179 
 
 " Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
 In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil 
 
 side 
 Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the 
 
 bloom or blight, 
 Parts the goats upon tjie left hand, and the sheep upon the 
 
 right. 
 And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that 
 
 light." 
 
 Thirty years later, in a calmer time, he reiterated 
 the same thought. If the words in Under the Old 
 Elm are less stirring, as perhaps befitted the rejoic- 
 ing at the completion of a hundred years of our 
 nation's history, they are not less convincing. 
 
 " The man's whole life preludes the single deed 
 
 That shall decide if his inheritance 
 Be with the sifted few of matchless breed. 
 
 Our race's sap and sustenance, 
 Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed. 
 
 Choice seems a thing indifferent; thus or so. 
 What matters it? The Fates with mocking face 
 
 Look on inexorable, nor seem to know 
 Where the lot lurks that gives life's foremost place. 
 
 Yet Duty's leaden casket holds it still. 
 
 And but two ways are offered to our will. 
 Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, 
 The problem stiU for us and all of human race." 
 
 Persistent though Lowell was in laying emphasis 
 upon work and production as assisting the soul to 
 make its way towards perfection, he saw quite as 
 clearly as Browning, that the test of a man is not 
 so much what he actually accomphshes as wliat he 
 
180 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 earnestly strives to do. Over against the English 
 poet's often-quoted line, 
 
 '"Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man 
 would do! " 
 
 we may well place a stanza of the American writer's 
 lines For an Allograph, — 
 
 " Greatly begin! though thou have time 
 But for a line, be that sublime, — 
 Not failure, but low aim is crime." 
 
 In the sonnet called The Street, Lowell drew a 
 picture of a singing crowd, every man in which was 
 but a ghost, since sometime in the past each one 
 had trampled on youth and faith and love, and 
 cast all hope of human-kind aside. Self-centered, 
 each had striven against Heaven's clear message 
 and conquered, only to find his spirit turned to 
 clay. In The Rose the poet did not hesitate to 
 admit that hate and scorn and hunger follow 
 close upon the footsteps of him who sacrifices him- 
 self for his fellow-man; but none the less he firmly 
 insisted that — 
 
 " Strength and wisdom only flower 
 When we toil for all our kind." 
 
 The final test of the soul to Lowell's mind is 
 always the choice which it makes among the things 
 of this world. In St. Michael the Weigher, he pic- 
 tures himself as standing in the presence of the 
 
James Russell Lowell 181 
 
 arch-angel and watching him as he places now on 
 one side of the balance, now on the other, the many 
 hopes of man. 
 
 " In one scale I saw him place 
 All the glories of our race, 
 Cups that Ut Belshazzar's feast, 
 Gems, the lightning of the East, 
 Kublai's sceptre, Caesar's sword. 
 Many a poet's golden word. 
 Many a skiU of science, vain 
 To make men as gods again. 
 
 " In the other scale he threw 
 Things regardless, outcast, few. 
 Martyr-ash, arena-sand, 
 Of St. Francis' cord a strand, 
 Beechen cups of men whose need 
 Fasted that the poor might feed, 
 Disillusions and despairs 
 Of young saints with grief-grayed hairs. 
 Broken hearts that brake for Man." 
 
 To the clear-eyed Lowell there was no question 
 of what the choice of man should be. Yet confi- 
 dent as he was of the truth of his vision, he did not 
 fail to see how often his weaker brethren hesitated 
 to press onward in the rugged and forbidding paths 
 of duty when the fields of pleasure spread out 
 invitingly before them. To such he frequently 
 addressed himself, urgently exhorting them to lay 
 hold upon the things which endure forever. At 
 times indeed he spoke almost as one having 
 authority and not as the scribes and Pharisees. 
 Certainly the mandate which stands at the close 
 
182 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 of the noble lines entitled Prometheus are hardly 
 less than scriptural in tone and import. 
 
 " Good never comes unmixed, or so it seems, 
 Having two faces, as some images 
 Are carved, of foolish gods; one face is ill; 
 But one heart Ues beneath, and that is good, 
 As are aU hearts when we explore their depths. 
 Therefore, great heart, bear up! thou art but type 
 Of what all lofty spirits endure, that fain 
 Would win men back to strength and peace through love, 
 Each hath his lonely peak, and on each heart 
 Envy, or scorn, or hatred, tears lifelong 
 With vulture beak; yet the high soul is left; 
 And faith, which is but hope grown wise, and love, 
 And patience which at last shall overcome." 
 
IX 
 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Whitman has not yet- been given his final place 
 among American poets. That he is to have a 
 permanent position there ceased to be doubted as 
 soon as it was discovered over haK a century ago, 
 that he could not be either wholly rejected or 
 completely ignored. From the moment he wrote 
 among his many introductory inscriptions to 
 Leaves of Grass the challenging words: 
 
 " Shut not your doors to me proud libraries; 
 For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, 
 yet needed most, I bring," 
 
 he pressed unflinchingly forward, and long before 
 his death succeeded in firmly estabUshing himself 
 within walls which had only reluctantly admitted 
 him. Nevertheless, he still presents a problem. 
 What is to be done with a singer whose voice can- 
 not be brought to accord with others in the choir? 
 Where among those who are most carefully selec- 
 tive of subject matter and most pains-taking in 
 expression, shall we place a self-professed singer 
 who is quite indifferent to the long accepted rules 
 of taste bounding the poet's field of thought and 
 limiting the poet's choice of diction? Where 
 indeed shall such a writer be assigned, that he may 
 
184 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 not detract from the impression which his fellow- 
 poets rightly make, and — to be just — that he 
 may not himself suffer through comparison with 
 them? Many an attempt has been made at meet- 
 ing such questions as these in connection with 
 Whitman; none, as yet, has been successful more 
 than moderately. When it is said that Whitman 
 never wrote a single poetic line, the critic is reduced 
 to silence by the citation of the beautiful phrase in 
 Come up from the Fields, Father, 
 
 " Where apples ripe iu! the orchards hang and grapes on the 
 treUis'd vines;" 
 
 or by the quotation of that stately passage in Song 
 of the Exposition, 
 
 " Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, 
 And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme.'' 
 
 When, on the other hand, one grows enthusiastic 
 over the nobihty, the uplift of Whitman's message, 
 he is forced to an apologetic attitude at the men- 
 tion of poems marred in their thought by coarse 
 passion, in their expression by repulsive words. 
 The truth probably Hes somewhere in the midst of 
 these diverse criticisms. The fact of the matter is 
 that the final test to which Whitman must eventu- 
 ally be subjected has not yet been devised, — if, 
 indeed, it ever can be. Weighed in the balance 
 which adequately serves to determine the true 
 worth of other American poets, he simply breaks 
 the scales. Some new method of evaluating him 
 
Walt Whitman 185 
 
 must therefore be found; and until it is found — 
 perhaps even after it is found — he will remain 
 unique in American Literature, — some wiU have 
 it, in all hterature. 
 
 Wordsworth's dictum, that the poet must him- 
 self create the taste by which he is judged, is 
 illuminating at this point. It proved true in his 
 case; it afterwards proved no less true in Tennyson's 
 and Browning's. Why may it not prove true in 
 Whitman's? Certainly the Camden Sage was only 
 recasting — probably quite unconsciously — the 
 thought of the Enghsh poet, when he wrote, 
 
 " I make the only growth by -which I can be appreciated." 
 
 Whatever general appreciation may be accorded 
 Whitman, he offers to the hasty reader but a barren 
 outlook from the religious point of view. At first 
 glance, indeed, he seems to promise far less in that 
 direction than did Poe, although no one can deny 
 that the sweep of his horizon line is much greater 
 than that which hemmed in the author of The 
 Raven. Furthermore, one will almost surely be 
 warned away by at least two classes of persons 
 among Whitman's admirers, those who object to 
 an interpreter and those who object to any attempt 
 at interpretation. The former will support them- 
 selves by quoting from Myself and Mine, 
 
 " I charge you, forever reject those who would expound me, 
 for I cannot expound myself, 
 I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free; 
 
186 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 the latter will offer in their defense the passage in 
 Calamus, 
 
 "I will certainly elude you, 
 Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught 
 
 me, behold! 
 Already you see I have escaped from you." 
 
 The implied objections are valid, the quotations 
 are apposite; for the interpreter of Whitman risks 
 a hazardous enterprise. " Writing about him," 
 said Mr. John Addington Symonds, " is enormously 
 difficult; ... it is hke talking about the uni- 
 verse," a remark echoed somewhat colloquially a 
 few years ago by an American critic in the words, 
 " As soon as I have said anything about Walt 
 Whitman, I am quite sure that I ought to have 
 said something else." Nevertheless, recalUng that 
 Mr. John Burroughs, the poet's very true friend 
 and perhaps sanest defender, has maintained that 
 of the two or three great passions which swayed 
 Whitman, his religious feeUng was doubtless 
 chief, one feels^privileged to make some attempt at 
 an analysis, though certain that the final word 
 cannot yet be said, of what Whitman's religious 
 thought really was. That the good gray poet had 
 little if any sympathy with what is called revealed 
 rehgion must be admitted at the outset, yet ad- 
 vancement upon him from that direction is cer- 
 tainly fair, since if he is to be understood at all, he 
 must be explained in terms having popular accepta- 
 tion. We may therefore respectfully approach 
 this poet, this man who in the earliest draft of 
 Song of the Broad-Age boldly described himself as 
 
Walt Whitman 187 
 
 " Arrogant, masculine, naive, rowdyish, 
 Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, country-man, 
 Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer-swimmer in 
 
 rivers or by the sea. 
 Of pure American breed, of reckless health — ample-limbed, 
 Coimtenance sunburnt, bearded, cahn, unrefined. 
 Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on 
 
 equal terms, 
 
 Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily vmder- 
 
 stood after all, — 
 Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely egotism, 
 Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength 
 
 against his," — 
 
 we may respectfully approach him and seriously 
 inquire what religion meant to him in general, and 
 what force there was for him in such particular 
 terms as God, Soul, Life, Death, and Immor- 
 tality. 
 
 Before undertaking to give, much less to discuss. 
 Whitman's definition of these terms, one must 
 remove certain obstructions which obscure them. 
 No inconsiderable body of writing contained in 
 Leaves of Grass should first be cast aside on the 
 ground that, whatever defense may be made of 
 its expression, its subject-matter is of such a 
 nature as to place it beneath consideration as 
 poetry in any sense of the term. Furthermore, 
 another large cantle must be shorn away, as was 
 the case with Emerson, on the score that it is 
 philosophic rather than reUgious. And finally 
 the indictment often made against Whitman that 
 he is an arch-egoist must be quashed. 
 
188 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 It has been said quite seriously that Whitman 
 frequently wrote as if he thought himself the first 
 person to discover that all men are naked under- 
 neath their clothes. The objection imphed in 
 these words can hardly be gainsaid. There is a 
 great deal of Whitman's work that cannot but be 
 repulsive, — nauseating indeed — to every right- 
 thinking reader. Obscenity is not virility, neither 
 is coarseness necessarily strength. On the con- 
 trary, their presence is, more often than not, a sign 
 of weakness. Modesty is never long humiliated by 
 the accusation of prudishness: her pride returns 
 and successfully withstands those who sneer against 
 her. Decency and virtue are absolute verities in 
 spite of the question which jesting Pilate would 
 not stay to hear answered. It follows, therefore, 
 that to defend on any conceivable ground aU that 
 Whitman wrote, is to fight for a cause which is 
 wholly without dignity a,nd honor. When he 
 boastingly disrobed in the hght of day, he was not 
 merely naked and unashamed, not merely barbaric; 
 he was degenerate. It is not enough for a partisan 
 of Whitman to point out that there is nothing in 
 Leaves of Grass inconsistent with the author's 
 point of view. It is true that there is not; but, 
 unfortunately the outlook from that point of view 
 happens to include no Uttle territory which ordi- 
 nary common-sense would silently cleanse of 
 noxious growths instead of exploiting it as bearing 
 life-gi-dng fruits and healthful grain. The advo- 
 cate for Whitman loses the case for his chent 
 when he piles up such quotations as these: 
 
Walt Whitman 189 
 
 " Of physiology from top to toe I sing, — 
 
 I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the 
 poet of wickedness also, — 
 
 In all people I see myself, none more and not one barley- 
 corn less; 
 And the good and evil I say of myself I say of them." 
 
 Such evidence proves too much. By it, out of his 
 own mouth is Whitman convicted. Nothing 
 remains but to pass judgment. The real trouble 
 with Whitman was that he lacked a sense of 
 balance. Possessed of an exuberant intellect, he 
 had no feeUng for relative values, he placed the 
 stamp of' approval upon everything which he 
 produced. That he needed to be saved from him- 
 self, Emerson, who saw much of Whitman's work 
 in manuscript, plainly perceived; but the wise 
 New Englander labored with his perverse friend in 
 vain. Whitman indeed has only himself to blame 
 that many of his " barbaric yawps " — his own 
 word for his utterances — must be ruled out of 
 court in any trial. Certainly much that he wrote 
 has no bearing upon any acceptable theory of 
 life, no connection with anything truly religious. 
 
 The other hindrances to a clear view of Whit- 
 man's religious thought — his strictly philosophical 
 poems and his alleged egotism — may each be 
 briefly disposed of. Although Whitman's philos- 
 ophy and reUgion are quite as closely interwoven 
 as are Emerson's, a considerable number of poems, 
 of which Eidolons furnishes a fair example, can be 
 
190 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 placed at one side as offering little or no help in 
 the search here undertaken. A few words of 
 comment, however, are not out of place in passing. 
 Mr. Burroughs has said, " Whitman was Emerson 
 translated from the abstract into the concrete." 
 That statement may be accepted perhaps; yet 
 the philosophy of Whitman differs greatly from 
 that of his friend: Emerson's shows at least a 
 basic unity and can be reduced to three or four 
 fundamental principles quite reconcilable with one 
 another. Whitman's, in strong contrast, is as vary- 
 ing as the winds that blow. He is more frankly 
 materiaHstic than anything else, yet not infre- 
 quently he is clearly idealistic too. He is some- 
 times pantheistic, sometimes theistic. Students of 
 the much differing Bergson and Nietzsche, more- 
 over, have pointed to elements which he has in 
 common with each. Whitman himself was not 
 unconscious of these incongruities, and recast 
 Emerson's remark in Self-Reliance, " A foolish 
 consistency is the hobgobUn of little minds, adored 
 by httle statesmen and philosophers and divines," 
 into the three lines in Song of Myself. 
 
 " Do I contradict myself? 
 Very well then I contradict myself, 
 (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" 
 
 Interesting as these facts may be, there is no 
 possibility of bringing the many diverse voices 
 into any single chorus, much less into harmony 
 with the song of religion. 
 
Walt Whitman 191 
 
 Closely connected with Whitman's philosophy 
 and possibly with his rehgion, strange as it may 
 seem, is the charge of egotism which is frequently 
 brought against him. Bayard Taylor did not 
 hesitate to advance it over half a century ago, and. 
 there has never been a time since, when it has not 
 been issuing from some quarter. The unfortunate 
 result has ensued that Whitman is not so widely 
 read as he should be, for we seem to be so consti- 
 tuted that we seldom Usten patiently to any man 
 who arrogates authority to himself. As a matter of 
 fact, although the charge brought against Whitman 
 is strictly true in the letter, it is all but wholly 
 false in the spirit. The pronoun I, no doubt, does 
 thickly bestrew the pages of Leaves of Grass, yet 
 any thoughtful reader must see that when Whitman 
 speaks in the first person, or when he names a 
 poem Me Imperturbe or Spontaneous Me, or Myself 
 and Mine, he is rarely thrusting himself forward. 
 Instead, he is really representing all mankind, he is 
 speaking as the mouthpiece of the race; he is, in 
 a true philosophic sense, the microcosm. So 
 explained, many of Whitman's utterances which 
 ordinarily awaken antagonism and others which 
 taken literally are at best repugnant, become 
 attractive and in no few instances helpful and 
 illuminating. It is a mistake to suppose that it 
 was the lyric and therefore strictly personal im- 
 pulse which made Whitman write as the opening 
 line of Song of Myself, 
 
 " I celebrate myself, and sing myseU," 
 
192 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 That the inspiration was instead epical, and there- 
 fore general and for all, is clear from the lines which 
 Whitman elected to stand first in Leaves of Grass 
 
 " One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, 
 Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. 
 
 " Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power, 
 Cheerful, for freest action formed under laws divine. 
 The modern man I sing." 
 
 Thus construed, the so-called egotism of Whitman 
 may not wholly vanish — cannot, perhaps, — but 
 it ceases to be the strangling and obscuring smoke 
 which has too long driven back many an honest- 
 minded critic. Especially will such a clearing of 
 the atmosphere be conducive to fairness in an 
 attempt to discover what rehgion meant to 
 Whitman. 
 
 An American critic writing destructively of 
 Whitman not long ago, made the statement that 
 the Camden Sage was irreligious. Had the young 
 man taken pains to read Leaves of Grass, he would 
 have known that his arrow stood no chance of 
 hitting the willow. It is true that Whitman him- 
 self stated more than once that he had cut loose 
 from churches, ecclesiasticism, creeds, and even 
 Christianity; yet it is clear that his purpose in so 
 separating himself was not that he might have less 
 reUgion, but that he might have more. Said he in 
 the poem entitled Starting from Paumanok, 
 
Walt Whitman 193 
 
 " I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate a 
 
 religion, — 
 I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, 
 None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough, — 
 Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater 
 
 reUgion, 
 The following chants each for its kind I sing: — 
 For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one 
 
 rising inclusive and more resplendent. 
 The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of 
 
 ReUgion." 
 
 Plainly, Wliitman had no thought of rejecting 
 religion. He rather looked upon it as the summum 
 bonum of life, as something above and beyond all 
 that science or literature or philosophy or art has 
 to offer; yet, not the less, is religion to him some- 
 thing which the simplest and the meanest may 
 possess equally with those whose lives have fallen 
 in pleasant places. Almost Emersonian in content 
 and diction is the noble prose passage in Notes 
 (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks. " There 
 is something greater (is there not?) than all the 
 science and poems of the world — above all else, 
 like the stars shining eternal — above Shakespeare's 
 plays, or Concord philosophy, or art of Angelo 
 or Raphael, — something that shines illusive, like 
 beams of Hesperus at evening — high above all the 
 vaunted wealth and pride — prov'd by its practical 
 out-cropping in life, each case after its own con- 
 comitants — the intuitive blending of divine love 
 and faith in a human emotional character — blend- 
 ing for all, for the unlearned, the common, and the 
 poor." There is nothing to support and much to 
 
194 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 refute the assertion that Whitman had little care 
 for religion. He was not a contemner, he did not 
 sit in the seat of the scornful. Rather was he an 
 enthusiast, a prophet conviaced of the vaUdity of 
 his new interpretation of old truth. Like Carlyle 
 he felt that' beneath all things excellent and eternal 
 is rehgion, that without it is no man truly manly, 
 no character reaUy noble, no nation great and 
 enduring. " I say " he wrote in the poem but 
 just now quoted, — 
 
 " I say that the real and permanent grandeirr of these States 
 must be their religion, 
 Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur; 
 (Nor character nor life worthy the name religion, 
 Nor land nor man nor woman without rehgion)." 
 
 Religion to Whitman was not merely a belief, 
 a creed, but a practical theory of life — or, better 
 perhaps, an actual Kving; it was something more 
 than passive receptivity, it was active conduct 
 day by day, hour by hour. Whitman took a 
 certain delight in shocking, in horrifying the 
 thoughtless by describing himself in Song of 
 Myself as 
 
 " Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding;" 
 
 but he must have known, or at least have hoped, 
 that large-minded readers would regard him as 
 accepting quite literally those remarkable words 
 of the founder of Christianity, " The kingdom of 
 God is within you." Whitman's rehgion was once 
 defined by Mr. Laurens Maynard as " an individ- 
 
Walt Whitman 195 
 
 ual mystic communion with the divine principle." 
 It is that certainly, but it is more; it is that com- 
 munion taking form in each day's work. Whitman, 
 no doubt, did hold, as Mr. WiUiam Guthrie has 
 asserted, that religion is essentially unsocial. He 
 no doubt expressed himself quite sincerely when he 
 wrote in Democratic Vistas: " I should say, indeed, 
 that only in the perfect uncontamination and soU- 
 tariness of individuality may the spirituality of 
 religion positively come forth at all. Only here, 
 and on such terms, the meditation, the devout 
 ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only here, communion 
 with the mysteries, the eternal problems, whence, 
 whither? . . . Bibles may convey, and priests ex- 
 pound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless opera- 
 tion of one's isolated SeK to enter the pure ether of 
 veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune 
 with the unutterable." StOl, it must not be for- 
 gotten that Whitman held no less that only in com- 
 panionship, in comradeship does life reach its high- 
 est development. Whitman's reUgion was a new 
 reading, a new interpretation of the teachings of 
 Christ, he had visions of a new heaven and a new 
 earth, and the corner-stone thereof was love. Thus 
 it came about that he could say in Calamus, — 
 
 " I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invisible to the attacks 
 
 of the whole of the rest of the earth, 
 I dreamed that was the new city of Friends, 
 Nothing was greater there than the quaUty of robust love, 
 
 it led the rest, 
 It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city. 
 And in all their looks and words." 
 
196 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Plainly Mr. Burroughs is right when he maintains 
 that Whitman's religion was larger than any creed 
 yet formulated, that its chief elements were faith, 
 hope, and charity, that its object was to prepare 
 one to hve, not to die, and, as Whitman himself 
 said, to " earn for the body and the mind what 
 adheres and goes forward, and is not dropped by 
 death." Although it must be admitted that Whit- 
 man never gave his rehgion formal definition or 
 outline, it is easy to discover what he held it truly 
 to be. If one would find phrasing for it, one may 
 turn quite unhesitatingly to a man to whom 
 Whitman was probably no more than a name, — 
 if indeed so much as a name. Whitman's poetry, 
 taken all in all, is a distinct though probably uncon- 
 scious recognition of the vaHdity of John Stu art 
 Millgl defiajtion, Qf.jrgligira as...".th&„strong. - and 
 earnest direction -of, the deskes and emotions taward 
 an ideal recognized as,of the bJghesL excellMiGe:" 
 Whitiiian's confidence in the reality and author- 
 ity of rehgion was based upon an acceptance of 
 two principles which many men have regarded as 
 wholly antagonistic — the reahty of the material 
 world which is about us, and the no less equal 
 reahty of a world which, though unmaterial, is 
 quite as near. To Whitman, physicaLand-spiritual 
 facts, logical and intuitional methods oi^ reaxjhing 
 conclusions, were of no differing impgrtanca. 
 So holding, he was able to arrive at what to him 
 was, and to his followers has become, a satisfactory 
 reconcihation between the teachings of science on 
 one hand and the aflSrmations of the soul on the 
 
Walt Whitman 197 
 
 other. He believed that both imparted the same 
 ultimate lesson, and that where there was danger of 
 error, they were mutually corrective. It may 
 be said of him as of no other poet, that he and his 
 writings were the obvious outcome of the work of 
 the chemist, the physicist, and the biologist; yet 
 his pages do i^ot the less bristle with references to 
 activities of the soul, — references far more con- 
 vincing than many found recorded by theologians 
 of repute. If one recalls that he wrote in Song 
 of Myself, — 
 
 " I accept Reality and dare not question it, 
 Materialism first and last imbuing, " 
 
 one must not forget that in Starting from 
 Paumanok he exclaimed, 
 
 " The soul, 
 Forever and forever — longer than soil is brown and solid — 
 longer than water ebbs and flows." 
 
 To Whitman's mind, it is safe to say, science, 
 instead of denying, supported the great intuitions 
 of the soul. He would have been the last to take 
 his stand with Professor Clifford who, as a result 
 of scientific studies, triumphantly boasted, " The 
 Great Companion is dead," rather was he in sym- 
 pathy with that famous scientist who looking 
 through his telescope upon the myriad stars, was 
 moved to exclaim, " The undevout astronomer is 
 mad." 
 Whitman did not make frequent use, as did 
 
198 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Tennyson and Browning, of the individual facts 
 and discoveries of the various sciences. His 
 interest was mainly in those larger conclusions 
 which take form as the result of a comparison of the 
 work of men laboring in widely diverse fields. 
 Even here, he had no desire to reconcile the nebular 
 liypothesis or the geologic fact^ of eons of CTgation 
 witiBTtEe'^ first chapter of Genesis; nor was he dis- 
 turbed by the apparent discrepancy between the 
 theory of evolution and the doctrines of the fall, 
 the redemption, and the salvation of man. If 
 long accepted theological conceptions failed to 
 maintain their position in the face of well attested 
 scientific facts, then so much the worse for those 
 conceptions — they must go. In Democratic Vis- 
 tas he commented on what he called an instructive 
 spectacle and conflict: " Science, testing absolutely 
 all thoughts, all works — a sun, moimting, most 
 illuminating, most glorious — surely never again 
 to set . . . against it deeply entrenched, holding 
 possession — the fossil theology of the mythic- 
 materialistic superstitious, untaught and credu- 
 lous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity." 
 If one shrinks from so bold a recognition of a 
 struggle which no one can deny is going on, one is 
 restored to confidence by another passage which 
 appears in the Preface of 1872, " With science, the 
 old theology of the East, long in its dotage, begins 
 evidently to die and disappear. But (to my mind) 
 science — and maybe such will prove its principal 
 service — as evidently prepares the way for one 
 indescribably grander — Time's young but perfect 
 
Walt Whitman 199 
 
 offspring — lusty and loving and wondrous beauti- 
 ful. . . . The supreme and final science is the 
 science of God — what we call science being only 
 its minister." Thus Whitman swings fuU circle, 
 or rather he moves upward on a spiral. He 
 returns, as man always does return, to certain 
 beliefs which are truer to him when he again stands 
 in their presence than they were when he first 
 beheld them; for he now finds them awaiting him 
 on a higher plane. 
 
 Two such beliefs were fundamental with Whit- 
 man, God and the Immortahty of the Soul. Of 
 their truth he was quite as certain as of the most 
 thoroughly authenticated discoveries of science. 
 His sincerity, moreover, is evidenced by the fact 
 that he did not seek reasons for his faith as does 
 many a man who, when doubts assail, buttresses 
 himself for the sake, not so much of his faith, as 
 of his peace of mind. Upon the nature and charac- 
 ter of God, Whitman dwelt perhaps less than any 
 other American poet. He was content to accept 
 His existence. Whitman's attitude was that of 
 the new order of priests who, he prophesied in the 
 , Preface of 1855 will yet arise, — priests who " shall 
 not deign to defend inunortaUty, or God, or the 
 perfection of things, or Uberty, or the exquisite 
 beauty and reaUty of the soul." He strove always 
 to be fair, he reiterated many times, " I do not 
 despise you, priests," yet his wonder over the 
 methods followed in many pulpits was ever that 
 which affected him in his early years, and which in 
 later life he recorded in By the Roadside, — 
 
200 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Silent and amazed even when a little boy, 
 I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in 
 
 his statements, 
 As contending against some being or influence." 
 
 In a very literal sense God to Whitman was a 
 spirit; and he saw, like the Apostle, that they who 
 worship Him must worship Him in spirit and 
 in truth. For this reason he refrained from any 
 tendency to make God anthropomorphic and 
 preferred to say, as in Passage to India, " with the 
 mystery of God we dare not dally " or better, as in 
 Song of Myself, — 
 
 " And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, 
 For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, 
 I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God 
 not in the least. 
 
 " Why should I wish to see God better than this day? 
 I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and 
 
 each moment then. 
 I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is 
 
 sign'd by God's name. 
 And I leave them where they are, for I know that whereso- 
 
 e'er I go. 
 Others will punctually come for ever and ever." 
 
 Nevertheless, despite Whitman's confession that 
 he did not understand God in the least, he some- 
 how, without obvious effort, managed to leave with 
 the readers of his poems a vivid impression of the 
 personaUty of the Creator and of His infinite good- 
 ness. The philosophic poems Eidolons and Chant- 
 ing the Square Deijic may exist and may even hold 
 
Walt Whitman 201 
 
 our attention for a time, but they readily give way 
 before numerous lines which make a much more 
 convincing appeal; they are, moreover, utterly 
 driven out of court when that noble passage strongly 
 suggestive of Carlyle at his best, is brought for- 
 ward from November -Boughs as a witness: 
 
 " What is poor plain George Fox compared to 
 WilUam Shakespeare — to fancy's lord, imagina- 
 tion's heir? Yet George Fox stands for something 
 too — a thought — the thought that wakes in 
 silent hours — perhaps the deepest, most eternal 
 thought latent in the human soul. This is the 
 thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral 
 right and the immortahty of identity. Great, 
 great is this thought — aye, greater than all else. 
 When the gorgeous pageant of Art, refulgent in the 
 sunshine, colored with roses and gold — with all 
 the richest mere poetry, old or new (even Shake- 
 speare's) — with all that statue, play, painting, 
 music, architecture, oratory, can effect, ceases to 
 satisfy and please — when the eager chase after 
 wealth flags, and beauty itself becomes a loathing — 
 and when all worldly or carnal or esthetic or even 
 scientific values, having done their office to the 
 human character, and minister'd their part to its 
 development — then, if not before, comes forth 
 this over-arching thought and brings its eligibili- 
 ties, germinations much neglected in life of all 
 humanity's attributes, easily covered with crust, 
 deluded and abused, rejected, yet the only certain 
 source of what all are seeking, but few or none find 
 — in it I myself clearly see the first, the last, the 
 
202 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 deepest depths, and the highest heights of art, 
 of literature, and of the purposes of Ufe. I say 
 whoever labors here, makes contributions here, or 
 best of all sets an incarnate example here, of life or 
 death, is dearest to humanity — remains after the 
 rest are gone. And here, for these purposes, and 
 up to the hght that was in him, the man George Fox 
 lived long, and died, faithful in life, and faithful in 
 death." 
 
 The thought of the hving God is indeed domi- 
 nant in both the prose and the poetry of Whit- 
 man, yet he found it impossible to regard Him, 
 whom he called in Song of the Exposition " The 
 loving Laborer through space and time," as mak- 
 ing Himself — as even able to make Himself of no 
 reputation and take upon Himself the Ukeness of 
 man. Whitman was by no means forgetful of 
 Jesus or his great work in the world, yet only now 
 and then did he allude to Him in his writings. 
 Somewhere, indeed, among Whitman's prose works 
 may be found a passage in which the author under- 
 took to explain in a few words what Christ appeared 
 for, yet he plainly did not regard Him as en- 
 dowed with divinity. Once, also, in Chanting the 
 Square Deific, he made Christ co-equal with 
 Jehovah, who " dispenses judgments inexorable 
 without the least remorse," and with the Santa 
 Spirita, who is " breather, Ufe, beyond the light, 
 hghter than Hght " and, rather interestingly, with 
 Satan, who " aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt, 
 still hves, still utters words, warlike, equal with 
 any, real as any." The poem from which these 
 
Walt Whitman 203 
 
 phrases are taken is really philosophic and not 
 religious. In it Whitman used the terms Jehovah, 
 Christ, Satan, and Holy Spirit, it is true; but he 
 was trying to show that for the triahgle which is 
 sometimes used as a symbol of the Trinity, a square 
 should be substituted, its sides respectively repre- 
 senting the great principles of Law and Judg- 
 ment, Love and Forgiveness, RebelUon and Evil, 
 and Reconciliation and Union of All in One. 
 Whitmah did not elsewhere speak of Christ above 
 four or five times. Three hues from as many 
 pages may be quoted as examples, — 
 
 " Walking the old hills of Judea with the beautiful gentle 
 God by my side," — 
 
 " I see Christ eating the bread of his last supper in the midst of 
 youths and old persons," — 
 
 " I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the 
 beautiful God the Christ." 
 
 Separated from their context at least two of these 
 hnes — and other parallel expressions might also 
 be quoted — convey the idea that Whitman did 
 indeed beUeve Christ to be the Son of God; but 
 no such conclusion can be held when the whole 
 poem in which each occurs is taken into considera- 
 tion. In every case Christ is associated — and in 
 no transcending way — with the gods of the 
 Greeks, the Romans, the Hindoos, and the Druids, 
 just as in a very late poem entitled Old Chants, 
 " the deep idylls of the Nazarene," were ranked 
 
204 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 with the Hindu epics, the Iliad, the wanderings 
 of ^neas, the Cid, the Nebelungen, the Border 
 Minstrelsy, the plays of Shakspere, the works of 
 Walter Scott, and the poems of Tennyson. 
 
 Whitman, however, did write one poem in which 
 his personal, as distinct from his Uterary attitude 
 toward Jesus may be discovered. It appears in 
 Autumn Rivulets and bears the title To Him that 
 was Crucified. To say the least, it is startling. 
 One can hardly look upon it as blasphemous, since 
 Whitman was clearly not intentionally irreverent; 
 yet no one of even ordinary refinement, whatever 
 his religious faith may be, can feel that the spirit of 
 ban camaraderie which pervades it, is in other than 
 the very worst taste. It is reprinted here simply 
 because it assists, as no other poem can assist, to 
 an understanding of Whitman's theory of Christ, — 
 
 " My spirit to yours, dear brother, 
 Do not mind because many sounding your name do not 
 
 understand you, 
 I do not sound your name, but I understand you, 
 I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, and to 
 
 salute those who are with you, before and since, and 
 
 those to come also, 
 That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and 
 
 succession, 
 We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, 
 We, enolosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all 
 
 theologies, 
 Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men, 
 We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject 
 
 not the disputers nor anything that is asserted, 
 We hear the bawling and din, we are reach'd at by divisions, 
 
 jealousies, recriminations on every side, 
 
Walt Whitman 205 
 
 They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my 
 
 comrade, 
 Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying 
 
 up and down till we make oiu* ineffaceable mark upon 
 
 time and the diverse eras, 
 Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of 
 
 races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as 
 
 we are." 
 
 The sole passage in which Whitman mentioned 
 the Holy Spirit — that which constitutes the fourth 
 division of Chanting the Square Deific — has 
 already been commented upon. The subject itself, 
 however, demands further attention, for Whitman 
 dwelt so frequently upon the affirmations of the 
 soul as being authoritative, that his readers are 
 immediately reminded of Whittier's trust in the 
 authenticity of the Inner Light and Emerson's 
 confidence in the existence of the Over-Soul. 
 The reason for this effect is not far to seek. Whit- 
 tier was a sincere member of the Society of Friends 
 from the beginning of his days to the end, Emerson 
 openly acknowledged the identity of more than one 
 of his teachings with the faith and practice of the 
 sect founded by George Fox; and Whitman, far 
 as he went afield, was of Quaker descent and seemed 
 never inclined to question the reahty of the plead- 
 ing, compelling voice of the Spirit, which all 
 Quakers regard as final proof that their funda- 
 mental doctrines are true. In a footnote to a 
 prose article upon Elias Hicks, Whitman wrote, 
 " The true Christian religion consists in noiseless 
 secret ecstasy and unremitted aspiration," and 
 
206 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 a few lines farther on he mentioned the soul of 
 man as " invisibly rapt, ever-waiting, ever respond- 
 ing to universal truth." The idea back of each of 
 these quotations is one, and they themselves 
 may safely be regarded as but the recasting of a 
 passage in one of the paragraphs which stand as a 
 preface to an article already drawn upon, " Always 
 Ehas Hicks gives the service of pointing to the 
 fountain of all naked theology, all religion, all 
 worship, all the truth to which you are possibly 
 eUgible — namely in yourself and your inherent 
 relation. Others talk of Bibles, saints, churches, 
 exhortations, vicarious atonements — the canons 
 outside of yourself and apart from man — EUas 
 Hicks to the reUgion inside of man's very own 
 nature." Here unquestionably is the very doc- 
 trine of the Inner Light, " the vital core," to use 
 Mr. Guthrie's words, " of Quakerism." 
 
 Yet one is not held to Whitman's prose writings 
 alone for proof of the behef, expressed in his own 
 words, that " the ideals of character, of justice, of 
 rehgious action, whenever the highest is at stake, 
 are to follow the inward Duty-planted law of the 
 emotional soul." Whitman's poetry abounds in 
 passages apt to the present subject, that are even 
 more convincing than any in his prose, for the 
 reason that in almost every instance they may be 
 regarded, as indeed they profess to be, utterances 
 of a poet, — or perhaps better, a seer. True, 
 Whitman, Mke Emerson, dehghted in such aphoris- 
 tic statements as " whatever satisfies souls is 
 true," " All truths wait in all things" and " Only 
 
Walt Whitman 207 
 
 what proves itself to every man and woman is 
 so " — statements which on account of their 
 terseness seem crammed with wisdom, but which 
 on analysis prove to be but little more than empty 
 sound. Again, he liked to make startUng asser- 
 tions such as these: — 
 
 " Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main 
 concern, and includes, and is the soul," — 
 
 " The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to 
 the body, if not more," — 
 
 " I have said that the soul is not more than the body, 
 
 And I have said that the body is not more than the soul." 
 
 r 
 
 The effect of such passages has not been to increase 
 the number of Whitman's readers. Many a man 
 who feels no call to challenge the strikingly parallel 
 thought ascribed by Browning to Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 
 "Nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul. " 
 
 cannot brook the American poet's utterances; 
 and refusing to read on, fails to discover that 
 although Whitman probably never thought of the 
 Holy Spirit as speaking in the heart of man, he yet 
 did regard the soul as the seat of final authority, 
 as the temple whence issued a voice no other than 
 divinfe. Just as the Inner Light received from the 
 Quaker a trust beyond that accorded to the words 
 of the Scriptures and the utterances of the Church, 
 so did this voice find in Whitman one who yielded 
 
208 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 himself in unquestioning obedience to its guidance. 
 Said he in Song of the Broad-Axe, — 
 
 " Outside authority enters only after the precedence of inside 
 authority "; 
 
 a statement to which in more than one place he 
 gave much fuller utterance and, in Song of Occupa- 
 tions, at least, a more poetic expression as, — 
 
 " We consider Bibles and religions divine — I do not say they 
 
 are not divine, 
 I say they have all grown out of you and may grow out of 
 
 you still, 
 It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life. 
 Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the 
 
 earth, than they are shed from you." 
 
 Such sentences, it is true, do not formulate the 
 doctrine of the Third Person of the Trinity as 
 defined by theologians; but it is not too much to 
 hold that they constitute a recognition of that 
 striving of the Spirit with man which is regarded 
 as the characteristic work of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Of the practical application of the second of those 
 two great commandments upon which, according 
 to the words of Jesus, hang all the Law and the 
 Prophets, Whitman was, among the poets of 
 America, the chief apostle. To some extent, 
 however variable in degree, all the others impUed 
 an aristocracy of the intellect; he preached — 
 lived indeed — a democracy absolutely without 
 alloy. With the exception of Poe, who did not 
 mention America in his poetry, they all looked upon 
 their country as a place in which man, untram- 
 
Walt Whitman 209 
 
 melled as never before, might work out his destiny; 
 and, in so doing, might make himself fit for mem- 
 bership in the brotherhood of which equality is 
 the chief cornerstone. Whitman's gospel was, 
 that all men are already fit. So strongly, indeed, 
 and so insistently did he dwell upon this fitness that 
 he is quite justly said to have identified American- 
 ism and Democracy, not with brotherhood, which 
 by its popularity has come to be hardly more than 
 a word to juggle with, but with comradeship, a 
 term which may be taken to stand for the actual 
 practice of the fundamental principle in the teach- 
 ings of Christ. Certainly Whitman had the 
 courage of his convictions — to such an extent 
 indeed, that he became a rock of stumbling. It 
 was not that he laid himself open to the charge of 
 egotism by announcing that he " had arrived," 
 or by hailing himself quite unblushingly as the 
 equal of every one of his predecessors; it was not 
 that he made himseK champion of a cause much 
 more unpopular m his own day than it is at the 
 present time, by announcing in the opening poem of 
 Leaves of Grass, — 
 
 " The Female equally with the Male I sing "; 
 
 it was not that he was often boldly unorthodox in 
 his religious teachings and even more often fear- 
 lessly unconventional in his moral theories. All 
 these things had been endured in America before. 
 Egotism and the equality of the sexes, and many 
 another fanaticism had existed even in high places 
 without causing much serious agitation in society. 
 
210 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 But here was a man, not of the New England 
 tradition, not of the Brahmin caste — to use the 
 apt expression of Holmes — who, no respecter of 
 persons and quite deficient in a sense of proportion, 
 undertook in Who Learns My Lesson Complete 
 and elsewhere to maintain without suggestion of 
 the possibility of any other point of view that — 
 
 " Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist, 
 The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and oSspring, 
 
 merchant, clerk, porter and customer, 
 Editor, author, artist and schoolboy," 
 
 the hired man in the fields, the ox-trainer, the 
 tan-faced prairie boy, the felon on trial in the courts, 
 and the learned professor at his desk are each every 
 whit as good as the other, or, as Whitman liked to 
 say even more disconcertingly, are each every 
 whit as bad as the other. It is smaU wonder that 
 our modern scribes and Pharisees were somewhat 
 disturbed, and that even the Sadducees were a bit 
 shaken. They might perhaps have contented 
 themselves with outward indifference, had the poet 
 gone no further; but they felt that they must speak 
 their disapproval when they read in the Unes To a 
 Common Prostitute — 
 
 " Be composed — be at ease, — 
 Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you. 
 Not tin the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves 
 
 to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and 
 
 rustle for you." 
 
 Such democracy and comradeship was not to be 
 borne. It perhaps afforded a too vivid recoUec- 
 
Walt Whitman 211 
 
 tion of a certain memorable occasion when a fear- 
 less young teacher arose from writing with his 
 finger upon the ground to say to those who had 
 gathered to tempt him, " He that is without sin 
 among you, let him first cast a stone." 
 
 The democracy taught by Jesus Christ may be 
 found quite UteraUy reproduced in the poems of 
 Whitman, so literally in fact that the American 
 writer seemed, perhaps still seems, to be preaching 
 a new gospel. All along the ages since the man of 
 Gahlee promulgated His very simple doctrines, 
 the accepted, but unsolved, problem has been so to 
 warp them that they may conform to the complexi- 
 ties of life, rather than that the latter may be 
 untangled and straightened to coincide with them. 
 Whitman, however, did not undertake to solve the 
 problem by either method; instead he rejected it 
 altogether, and began anew with the fundamental 
 principle in its purity. No less than Saint Paul 
 did he see that the greatest thing in the world is 
 love. Said he in Calamus, — 
 
 " Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Ger- 
 manic systems, 
 Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and ScheUing and 
 
 Hegel, 
 Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato, 
 And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine 
 
 having studied long, 
 I see reminiscent today those Greek and Germanic systems. 
 See the philosophies all, Christian Chinches and tenets see. 
 Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ 
 
 the divine I see 
 The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of 
 friend to friend." 
 
212 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Many times elsewhere did Whitman return to the 
 same theme. It is found in The Mystic Trumpeter, 
 in Starting from Paumanok, in For You, Democ- 
 racy, in Song of the Broad-Axe, and in a considera- 
 ble number of other poems where the emphasis is 
 laid upon the general brotherhood of man, upon the 
 need of each for all and all for each. But Whitman 
 did not stop there. Had he done so his message 
 would have sounded no new note; would have 
 fallen far short of containing the essential teaching 
 of Christ. It is in such poems as Out of the Rolling 
 Ocean, The Crowd, To You, Song of the Open Road 
 and Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances, that we 
 discover wherein Whitman differs from other poets. 
 In these poems and oftentimes elsewhere, he makes 
 clear his behef that the hope of the perfection of the 
 race — of the salvation of man, if one will — rests 
 upon a general feeling of good-will to all mankind, 
 not upon a mere ready acceptance of the abstract 
 theory that all men are born free and equal, but 
 upon intense personal regard, upon strong active 
 affection which is no other than love indeed. 
 Clearly Whitman taught a hard doctrine, nor was 
 the world any more ready to receive it in the nine- 
 teenth century than it was when a greater than 
 Whitman taught it in the first. 
 
 Of special interest is it to know that Whitman 
 beUeved America to be the land in which this true 
 democracy of friends would eventually be estab- 
 lished. So firmly, indeed, did he hold to this 
 belief that his patriotism may be regarded as an 
 essential element of his religion. Said he in a foot- 
 
Walt Whitman \ 213 
 
 note to Preface, 1876, " In my opinion, it is by a 
 fervent, accepted development of comradeshiji, 
 the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, 
 latent in all young fellows, north and south, east 
 and west — it is by this, I say, and by what goes 
 directly and indirectly along with it, that the United 
 States of the future (I cannot too often repeat), 
 are to be most effectually welded together, inter- 
 polated, anneal'd into a Uving union." American- 
 ism was never less than a passion, a religious pas- 
 sion with Whitman. In the early poem To 
 Foreign Lands, he boldly wrote, — 
 
 " I heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle, 
 
 the New World, 
 And to define America, her athletic Democracy, 
 Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them 
 
 what you want." 
 
 These words constitute an acceptance of a mission. 
 Other lessons, no doubt, he had to teach; yet to 
 define America to the old world and to herself also, 
 was no unimportant part of his work. Always 
 insisting, as in Calamus, that he was called " to 
 celebrate the need of comraides " and, as in many 
 another poem, that he must " sing the song of 
 companionship," he frequently enlarged the 
 thought until it took the form which with him 
 found its most direct expression perhaps in To the 
 East and to the West as, 
 
 " I beUeve the main purport of these states is to found a 
 superb friendship, exalte, previously unknown, 
 Because I perceive it waits and has been always waiting 
 latent in all men." 
 
214 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 This faith made America holy ground to Whitman. 
 He mentioned every state in the Union, and the 
 name of each fell from his Ups Hke a caress; he 
 began an invocation to his country with the love- 
 filled phrase " Thou mother with thy equal Brood" ; 
 he professed in the time of peace " to hear America 
 singing her varied carols; " and he maintained no 
 less, in those years when the land was rent by civil 
 strife, that " over the carnage rose prophetic a 
 voice foretelUng the invincibiUty of the repubhc of 
 those who love each other." Asia and Europe had 
 been given their opportunity, he said, only to 
 prove unworthy of their trust; would America 
 likewise fail? He could not feel that it would. 
 
 Science, which may be said to have advanced to 
 full manhood in the nineteenth century, and 
 Democracy, which may be regarded as having at 
 least arrived at its majority in the United States, 
 both working together were, to Whitman's mind, 
 preparing the way for a religion indescribably 
 grander than the old theology of the East, — 
 " Time's younger, but perfect offspring — heir of 
 the West — lusty and loving and wondrous 
 beautiful." " There can be," he went on to say 
 in the preface to As a Strong Bird on Pinions 
 Free," no sane and complete personahty, nor any 
 grand and electric nationaUty, without the stock 
 element of rehgion imbuing all other elements. 
 . . . The time has certainly come to begin to dis- 
 charge the idea of rehgion in the United States, 
 from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays, and 
 churches, and church-going, and assign it to that 
 
Walt Whitman 215 
 
 general position, chiefest, most indispensable, most 
 exhilarating, to which' the others are to be adjusted, 
 inside of all human character, and education and 
 affairs. The people, especially the young men and 
 women of America must begin to learn that reUg- 
 ion (Uke poetry), is something far, far different 
 from what they had supposed. It is, indeed, too 
 important to the power and perpetuity of the New 
 World to be consign'd any longer to the churches, 
 old or new, Cathohc or Protestant — Saint this or 
 Saint that. It must be consign'd henceforth to 
 democracy en masse, and to literature. It must 
 enter into the poems of the nation. It must make 
 the nation." 
 
 This perfection of rehgion, this culmination of 
 life whether personal or national could not, to 
 Whitman's mind, be attained either by following 
 the rules of conventional moraUty or by returning 
 to older ideals, however much better those older 
 ideals might seem to be. Here again the poetry 
 of Whitman became a stumbUng-block. It taught 
 a new conduct of hfe, a new theory of values, a 
 new relationship between good and evil. Early 
 critics of Whitman contented themselves 'with say- 
 ing that he was immoral. Their successors felt 
 that this word would not do, and substituted the 
 term unmoral. Plainly, however, they too were at 
 fault, for Whitman himself left it on record that he 
 " felt temporary depression more than once, for 
 fear in ' Leaves of Grass ' the moral parts were not 
 sufficiently pronounced." Such concern as this — 
 and he gave voibe to it now and again — shows that 
 
216 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Whitman was not without moral sense, though 
 indeed his morality might be a new moraUty. He 
 believed, as Mr. Burroughs has well pointed out, 
 that " the time had come for an utterance out of 
 radical, uncompromising human nature; let con- 
 ventions and refinements stand back, let nature, 
 let the soul, let the elemental forces speak; let 
 the body, the passions, sex, be exalted; the stone 
 rejected by the builders shall be the chief stone of 
 the corner." Illuminating as this summary is, 
 it is itself no more than an expansion of what 
 Whitman said for himself when he wrote in Song 
 of Myself, 
 
 " I permit to speak at every hazard 
 Nature without check, with original energy." 
 
 Such frankness as this could but meet with disap- 
 proval. One might brook, because of its vague- 
 ness, another line in the same poem, 
 
 " Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is 
 not my soul; " 
 
 yet one could hardly allow to pass without em- 
 phatic protest such later lines as, — 
 
 " Through me forbidden voices, 
 Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil, 
 Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd." 
 
 Plainly, said his opponents, the man is mad, or if 
 not mad, certainly lacking in all sense of balance. 
 Small wonder was it to them, then, that he so far 
 
Walt Whitman 217 
 
 forgot himself as to identify good and evil, and to 
 say in Starting from Paumanok, 
 
 " Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may, 
 I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also, 
 I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is — 
 
 and I say there is in fact no evil, 
 (Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land 
 
 or to me as any thing else is)." 
 
 Clearly it was possible without intentional 
 injustice to bring damaging evidence against 
 Whitman. He was so eager to give emphatic 
 expression to his new doctrine that he often failed 
 to make sufficiently prominent the fundamental 
 principle supporting it. As a matter of fact he did 
 say in To Think of Time, 
 
 "The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion;" 
 
 and to that truth he held tenaciously. It is 
 unfortunate that he did not carry out the promise 
 made in an early poem, 
 
 " I will show that whatever happens to anybody, it may be 
 turned to beautiful results." 
 
 Perhaps he could not, for the reason that he often 
 lost sight of a certain essential. Quite uncon- 
 sciously to himself he was trying in the Une just 
 quoted, to give voice to an idea which is as old as 
 Christianity — older in fact, although it did not 
 take on its perfect form until it was uttered by 
 Saint Paul. The Apostle to the Gentiles saw the 
 truth in its entirety. Whitman only in part. The 
 American poet's thought was that all things work 
 
218 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 together for good; Saint Paul's that they so work 
 together to them that love God. Whether or not 
 it is allowed that this point is well taken, it will be 
 admitted by any attentive reader of Whitman that 
 he did not so much deny the existence of evil, as 
 he insisted that evil is but a passing phase of good- 
 ness. " All that is evil," he exclaimed in Roaming 
 in Thought, " I saw hastening to merge itself and 
 become lost and dead." So beUeving, he felt con- 
 strained to insist that since there is no such thing 
 as permanent evil, there is no such thing as evil 
 at aU. If it be pointed out that this teaching is 
 very old — far older than Whitman, far older than 
 America indeed, it wiU be admitted perhaps that 
 in Birds of Passage he gave it an expression which 
 clothed the dry bones of an old philosophy and 
 made them once more a living thing. 
 
 " In this broad earth of ours, 
 Amid the measvtreless grossness and the slag. 
 Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
 Nestles the seed perfection. 
 
 " By every life a share or more or less, 
 None born but it is born, conceai'd or unconceal'd, the seed 
 is waiting. 
 
 " In spu-al routes by long detours, 
 (As a much tacking ship upon the sea), 
 For it the partial to the permanent flowing, 
 For it the real to the ideal tends, 
 For it the mystic evolution. 
 Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified. 
 
Walt Whitman 219 
 
 " Forth from their masks no matter what, 
 From the huge festering truth, from craft and guile and 
 
 tears 
 Health to emerge and joy, joy universal. 
 
 " Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow, 
 Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men 
 
 and states, 
 Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all, 
 Only the good is universal." 
 
 The final solution of the problem of the relation- 
 ship between good and evil will, almost beyond a 
 doubt, yield a satisfying answer to every question 
 arising in connection with the conduct of life. 
 Whitman, however, never laid claim to having 
 reached such a solution, nor did he undertake to 
 answer more than a very few of the many ques- 
 tions which harassed him as they harass every 
 man. " It is therefore impossible," as Mr. Guthrie 
 remarks, " to extract a Uttle treatise on morals, 
 and quite as difficult to obtain a systematic solu- 
 tion of the problem of evil from Whitman's poems." 
 As a matter of fact more than once Whitman 
 insisted that he presented nature — human nature 
 — as it is, and implied that each man must draw, 
 his own conclusions, set his own value upon this 
 and that, make his own choice between what seemed 
 to him good and evil, and in the end abide by the 
 results of that choice. Still the attitude of Whit- 
 man towards the intrinsic value of the objects of 
 choice was by no means one of indifference. He 
 might say in Myself and Mine, 
 
220 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " I give nothing as duties 
 What others give as duties, I give as living impulses; " 
 
 yet any reader other than the most cursory must 
 see that Whitman was constantly inculcating the 
 lesson that every true man fights the battle of life 
 nobly and courageously. Like Lowell's ideal 
 American described in the Commemoration Ode 
 as one — 
 
 " Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth 
 Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, 
 Fed from within with all the strength he needs," 
 
 SO Whitman's stalwart man was he who, sure of 
 himself, sure of his mission, could trust the prompt- 
 ings of his own soul. " Such a heroic person," 
 the poet said in his first preface to Leaves of 
 Grass " walks at his ease through and out of that 
 custom or precedent in authority that suits him 
 not." ... he is " as superb as a nation since he 
 has the qualities which make a superb nation." 
 To such a man the present, as Whitman points 
 out in Song of Myself, is always the accepted time, 
 
 " This minute that comes over the past decillions 
 Then is no better than it and now." 
 
 And upon Ihat time he seizes. Nothing will 
 satisfy his soul " except to walk free and own no 
 superior." He sees that " there is no trade or 
 employment; but the young man following it may 
 become a hero " ; whsitever his occupation may be, 
 if he but takes his stand upon the dictum recorded 
 in Song of the Broad-Axe, 
 
Walt Whitman 221 
 
 " Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million 
 universes . . . 
 How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed! 
 How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before 
 a man's or woman's look! " 
 
 From that vantage ground he fights the good fight. 
 It Httle matters according to Whitman what the 
 outcome may be; what greatly matters is the 
 courage with which the conflict is borne. " Have 
 you heard," he asks in Song of Myself, 
 
 " Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? 
 I also say it is good to fall : battles are lost in the same spirit 
 in which they are won." 
 
 " Vivas to those who have fail'd! 
 And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! 
 And to those themselves who sank in the sea! 
 And to all generals that lost engagements, and all over- 
 coming heroes! 
 And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest 
 heroes known." 
 
 The heroic conduct of life was a constant theme 
 with Whitman; yet, great as was the emphasis 
 which he placed upon it, he subordinated it to 
 another larger theme — that of immortality. He 
 could not do otherwise. Life in the flesh, whatever 
 its certainty, was to his mind no more than an 
 incident in an existence which has neither beginning 
 nor ending since it always has been and always 
 will be. It has been pointed out by more than one 
 critic that the lines in Song of Myself, 
 
222 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Has any one supposed it lucky to be bom? 
 I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die," 
 
 do not necessarily imply anything more than the 
 certainty of our present life. Yet one has but to 
 read on in the same poem to discover that Whitman, 
 like Browning, modernizing a world-old belief, 
 held quite clearly that — 
 
 " Ages past the soul existed, 
 
 Here an age 'tis resting merely. 
 And hence fleets again for ages." 
 
 To not a few readers Whitman's presentation is 
 less attractive, less poetic in expression than that 
 found in the writings of Browning, or of Words- 
 worth, or of many another poet who has had the 
 courage to look before as well as after. Still one 
 must admit that the virility in Whitman's words 
 carries a conviction which the greater beauty of 
 theirs cannot. "It is time to explain myself " 
 he said, in Song of Myself, " let us stand up "; 
 
 " The clock indicates the moment — what does eternity 
 indicate? " 
 
 " Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even 
 there, 
 I waited unseen and always, and slept the lethargic mist. 
 And took my time, and took no hurt from the feted carbon. 
 
 " Immense have been the preparations for me, 
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me, 
 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like faithful 
 
 boatmen. 
 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings 
 They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 
 
Walt Whitman 223 
 
 All forces have been steadily employed to complete and 
 delight me, 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust sovd." 
 
 No fair critic can deny that this passage to say the 
 least is evolution poetized — science brought to 
 perfect expression. One may prefer to recall the 
 beautiful passage in Wordsworth's famous Ode 
 " traihng clouds of glory do we come from God who 
 is our home"; yet as one reads the words of 
 Whitman, one feels quite as certain for oneself as 
 the American poet felt for himself, that there never 
 was a time when past generations did not guide 
 him, that there never was a time when he was not. 
 The future, too, was quite as sure to Whitman as 
 the past, " welcome, ineffable grace of dying 
 days," he exclaimed in Song of Myself, 
 
 " There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage, 
 If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their 
 surfaces were this moment reduced back to a paUid 
 float, it would not avail in the long run. 
 We should surely bring up again where we now stand, 
 And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther." 
 
 The vision of Whitman, then, is the vision of 
 eternity; and through its limitless expanse the 
 poet sees the s6ul of man ever moving onward. 
 Delayed the soul may be at any time, even as it is 
 often delayed during its sojourn in the flesh; yet 
 no let, no hindrance can permanently check its 
 progress or its growth. Even as the starry systems 
 " multiphed as high as one can cipher, edges but 
 the rim of farther systems," so is it, says Whitman 
 in the poem but just quoted, with the soul, — 
 
224 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " Wider and wider it spreads expanding, always expanding, 
 Outward and outward and forever outward." 
 
 The thought of the unending continuance of the 
 soul was ever dominant with Whitman. It was 
 sounded in such early work as Starting from 
 Paumanok, Song of Myself, and Song of the Uni- 
 versal; it was reiterated in many of the poems 
 which were gathered under the general title of 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death; and it served as the 
 keynote to which the contents of all the later 
 volumes, Songs of Parting, Sands at Seventy, and 
 Good-bye, My Fancy, were attuned. At times 
 indeed it transcended those other themes which 
 almost always stood first with Whitman, — the 
 themes of Americanism, Democracy, and Comrade- 
 ship. Important as he held these to be, he yet 
 could write in the Preface of 1876: " I am not sure 
 but the last inclosing sublimation of race or poem 
 is, what it thinks of death. After the rest has 
 been comprehended and said, even the grandest — 
 after those contributions to mightiest nationahty, 
 or to sweetest song, or to the best personalism, 
 have been fully accepted and sung, and the per- 
 vading fact of visible existence is sounded and 
 apparently completed, it still remains to be really 
 completed by suffusing through the whole, that 
 other pervading invisible fact combining the rest 
 and furnishing for person or state the only perma- 
 nent and unitary meaning. ... In my opinion, 
 it is no less than this idea of immortality, above all 
 other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give 
 
Walt Whitman 225 
 
 crowning religious stamp to democracy." . . . 
 It is true that Whitman shuddered a moment 
 before the mocking voice which cried in Yet, Yet 
 Ye Downcast Hours. " Matter is conqueror — 
 matter, triumphant only, continues onward," 
 and that he paused to ask in Thought, " Are souls 
 drown'd and destroy'd? Is only matter tri- 
 umphant? " This mood, however, had no long 
 endurance. It retired before the thought that as 
 the day cannot exhibit all things to man, so 
 neither can life; that as the night is a true and lov- 
 ing teacher, so also is death. Whitman could not 
 bring himself to admit that the soul will ever suffer 
 annihilation; he was quite sure that " the future 
 is no more uncertain than the present." He 
 therefore, hke Browning, could " greet the unseen 
 with a cheer." The future held for him unending 
 possibilities, unending promises. Eagerly, in Pas- 
 sage to India, did he entrust himself to the seas of 
 eternity, enheartening his soul with those stirring 
 words, — 
 
 " Sail forth — steer for the deep waters only 
 Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me, 
 For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go 
 And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. 
 O my brave sovil! 
 O farther, farther saill 
 
 O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? 
 O farther, farther, farther saU! " 
 
 But, some one may say, our remembrance of 
 experience in past ages, if we admit that we had 
 existence then, is but vague — too vague to yield 
 
226 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 us certainty, too vague to add to present joy or 
 pain; how then can we find peace or satisfaction 
 in contemplating a future, allowiug its possibility, 
 which may be as wanting in memory of the present 
 as the present is of the past? The question is by 
 no means idle. Happily Whitman, though prob- 
 ably quite unconsciously, provided an answer. 
 " I am the chanter of Personality " he wrote in 
 To a Historian; " nothing endures but personal 
 qualities," he added in Song of the Broad-Axe; 
 "1 know I am deathless," he insisted in Song of 
 Myself, — : 
 
 " I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's 
 compass; 
 I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a 
 burnt stick at night." 
 
 Such knowledge, such certainty is manifestly 
 possible only when personality and individuaUty 
 mean one and the same thing. Whitman indeed 
 used the term interchangeably. In Democratic 
 Vistas one may read, " We come now to what is of 
 the only real importance, Personahties," and in 
 By Blue Ontario's Shore one hghts upon the expres- 
 sion, the meaning of which is no different, " Under- 
 neath all, individuals." This personality, this 
 individuality, this identity, to use another term of 
 Whitman's, was in his thought a special gift of our 
 present existence, a gift which, though held in 
 reserve during eons of past time, is now ours for- 
 ever. We cannot lose it, it cannot be taken from 
 us. " You are not thrown away," Whitman 
 maintained, in To Think of Time, 
 
Walt Whitmafi 227 
 
 " You gather closely and safely around yourself, 
 Yourself! yourself! yourself forever and ever! 
 It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your father 
 
 and mother, it is to identify you. 
 Something long preparing and formless is arriv'd and form'd 
 
 in you, 
 You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes." 
 
 This persistence of individuality is one of Whit- 
 man's main teachings. Now and again as he 
 preached it, he seemed to speak as by inspiration. 
 Often when we read, we are ahnost led to exclaim, 
 " Surely this jnan was a prophet! " Conviction 
 seizes upon us; and carried away by the poet's 
 words, we, no less than he, " smiling content at 
 death " look out upon the future, confident that 
 endowed with our present personahty, we shall 
 move onward to no uncertain goal. The haunting 
 words of Tennyson, " I hope to see my Pilot face 
 to face " may still possess their charm, the tri- 
 umphant faith of Browning which found its perfect 
 expression in the concluding lines of Prospice may 
 lose no whit of its power; yet neither Tennyson 
 with all his beauty, nor Browning with all his 
 strength, gives the feeUng of security, the sense of 
 assurance which is ours, when we hear the voice of 
 Whitman chanting of the Eternal Voyage, — 
 
 " Passage to more than India! 
 Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! 
 Away O soul! [hoist instantly the anchor 
 Cut the hawsers — haul out — shake out every sail! 
 
 Greater than stars or suns, 
 
 Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth. 
 
228 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 What cheerful willingness for others' sake to give up all! 
 
 For others' sake to suffer all! 
 
 Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev'd. 
 
 The seas all crossed, weather'd the capes, the voyage done. 
 
 Surrounded, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain'd 
 
 As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother 
 
 iovmd, 
 The Younger melts in fondness in his arms." 
 
X 
 
 THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE 
 MATTER 
 
 The poets of America can hardly be said to have 
 made cbntributions of value to formal theological 
 thought. Neither intentionally nor unintentionally 
 did they offer demonstrable solutions to any of the 
 important problems which confront the theologian, 
 much less did they, either as a group or as individ- 
 uals, furnish material from which a system of 
 theology, even the simplest, can be formulated. 
 In other words, they were poets, — and poets 
 alone. As such they remained unwaveringly true 
 to their call, hearing indeed no other. In a very 
 true sense, therefore, they were not disobedient to 
 that heavenly vision which it was their privilege to 
 enjoy. Nevertheless, as poets they were con- 
 spicuously religious. Their writings abound in 
 records of their religious experiences; the inspira- 
 tion of numbers of their poems was undoubtedly 
 Christian; and their mission to no small degree 
 was and still continues to be a fulfilling, though 
 more often than not, an unconscious fulfiUing of 
 the injunction of Isaiah to strengthen the^weak 
 hands, to confirm the feeble knees. 
 
 This marked religious element in American 
 poetry may be what has preserved it alive. Cer- 
 tainly in the possession of no other characteristic 
 
230 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 can the poets of this country vie on equal tenns 
 with their contemporaries in England. The narra- 
 tives of Longfellow show but thin and pale beside 
 the Idylls of the King. Whittier, much as he had 
 in common with Burns and Wordsworth, was 
 inferior to the former as a poet of common Ufe and 
 was outstripped by the latter as a poet of nature. 
 Whitman with all his originaMty, ruggedness, and 
 strength, fell short of Browning in breadth and 
 power. Furthermore, similar conclusions must 
 nearly always be drawn when Bryant, Poe, Emer- 
 son, Holmes, and LoweU are set on one hand against 
 Keats, Shelley, Byron, Arnold, and Swinburne on 
 the other. If, however, we limit ourselves to the 
 reUgious point of view, we discover a change in 
 relative proportions. In the expression of firm 
 faith and confident hope the hymns of Bryant, 
 Whittier, and Holmes are always the equal and 
 not infrequently the superior of those written by 
 English poets. Again, the many questions which 
 the thought of death awakens, are quite as reso- 
 lutely met and quite as courageously answered by 
 Longfellow and Lowell as by Browning; and the 
 certainty of immortality is much more convinc- 
 ingly asserted in Emerson and Whitman than in 
 that great poem which to many a reader is an anchor 
 of hope, the In Memoriam of Tennyson. Still 
 further, there stands out persistently in American 
 poetry such a rarely and certainly never deeply 
 shaken belief in the goodness of God, always re- 
 garded as the very Father of His children, that 
 before it the scepticism of Arnold, the doubt of 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 231 
 
 Clough, the indifference of Rossetti, the infidelity 
 and violence of Swinbourne become altogether 
 lighter than vanity, mere chaff which the wind 
 driveth away. American poetry, it need not be 
 denied, has often qualities which will go far towards 
 making it hve for a long period of time, perhaps 
 forever; yet it cannot be unsafe to maintain that 
 as by its religious content it has in the past made 
 itseK loved in quarters where no other poetry was 
 being read, so wiU it in the future continue to win 
 its way to the heart of many a man for whom poets 
 as a rule have no inteUigible message. 
 
 The greater poets of America chose that good 
 part which shall not be taken away. They spoke, 
 and though dead, yet speak, not to the intellect 
 primarily, but, as befits the poet, to the feeUngs. 
 Neither the theologian with his ingenious subtle- 
 ties, nor the philosopher with his complacent 
 agnosticism, nor the scientist with his confident 
 certainties can give us the restful sense of security 
 which our poets, when they speak religiously, are 
 able to impart. They do not urge us to belief 
 in God by bringing forward those various argu- 
 ments which are differentiated in theology as 
 cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral, and 
 historical. Of these thirlgs they wiU have nothing. 
 Instead, they assume without question that it is 
 quite as sufficient for us, as it is for them, to fall 
 back upon personal expression and say with Saint 
 Paul, " I know in whom I have beUeved." Again, 
 although our poets might easily have been led to 
 admit the validity of what Professor Huxley, the 
 
232 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 scientist, spoke of as " worship for the most part of 
 the silent sort at the altar of the Unknown," they 
 could not have been brought to agree with him, — 
 as but few of us can be, — when he went on to say 
 that the same science which made such worship 
 alone legitimate, " had also found the ideas which 
 can still spiritual cravings." Professor Huxley 
 was ably refuted by his own countryman Matthew 
 Arnold; yet it may well be pointed out that the 
 argument of the distinguished critic was itself 
 anticipated by an American poet nearly a decade 
 before it was uttered. Said Whitman in his 
 preface to the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass: 
 " Accepting modern science, and loyally following 
 it without the sUghtest hesitation, there remains 
 ever recognized stiU a higher flight, a higher fact, 
 the eternal soul of man, the spiritual, the reUgious — 
 which it is to be the greatest office of scientism 
 and of future poetry also to launch forth in renew'd 
 faith and scope a hundredfold. To me, the worlds 
 of reUgiousness, of the conception of the divine, 
 and of the ideal, are just as absolute in himianity 
 and the universe as the world of chemistry, or 
 anything in the objective worlds. To me " — 
 and here Whitman quoted from one of his own 
 poems — 
 
 " To me the prophet and the bard, 
 Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet, 
 Shall mediate to the Modem, to Democracy, — interpret 
 yet to them 
 
 Grod and eidolons." 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 233 
 
 Plainly Whitman was far less antagonistic to 
 the theories of Huxley than was Arnold, yet on the 
 other hand, his sturdy championship of poetry as 
 having a true mission, — a true religious mission 
 — makes the latter's espousal of the cause, sincere 
 as it certainly was, appear almost weak-hearted. 
 When the true balance is struck, Arnold's sub- 
 stitution of culture for reUgion is not more satisfying 
 to the soul of man than is Huxley's insistence that 
 the religion of the future must be wholly deter- 
 mined by the methods of natural science. No 
 inconsiderable number of mankind will admit, and 
 of that number the majority, it is safe to say, will 
 insist that there are times when, as Emerson 
 preached unceasingly, " the mind receives a divine 
 wisdom from a source at once the essence of genius, 
 the essence of virtue, and the essence of Hfe, a 
 source which we caU Spontaneity or Instinct, or 
 Intuition, the last fact behind which analysis 
 cannot go." Huxley would have denied the 
 validity of wisdom so derived — did in fact deny 
 that there was a source from which such wisdom 
 could issue, maintaining that religion " like all 
 other kinds of knowledge, arises out of the action 
 and interaction of man's mind with that which is 
 not man's mind;" he made no allowance for things 
 of the spirit, lie beheld in a very Uteral sense the 
 wind, the earthquake, and the fire; but he heard 
 not the voice of God which speaks to the listening 
 heart of man. And Arnold likewise had ears to 
 hear; but though hearing, did not understand. 
 The highest for him was " to know the best which 
 
234 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 has been thought and said in the world." His 
 objection to Huxley's teaching was not that it 
 overlooked or denied the instinct of man for real 
 religion, but that it did not allow for the " fortify- 
 ing and elevating and quickening and suggestive 
 power of art and poetry and eloquence to relate 
 the results of modern science to our need for con- 
 duct, our need for beauty." Between the highly 
 educated army captained by Huxley and the well- 
 cultured host led by Arnold, reUgion would have 
 been, would be, in narrow straits, had it not been, 
 were it not, for poetry — poetry, which, especially 
 when it speaks rehgiously, calmly, assumes, with 
 Emerson " an inspiration which giveth man wis- 
 dom, an inspiration which cannot be denied without 
 impiety, an intelligence which makes us organs of 
 its activity and receivers of its truth, a soul for the 
 explanation of which aU metaphysics, all philos- 
 ophy is at fault, a soul the presence or absence of 
 which is all we can aflSrm." 
 
 The Church in our day and generation, it can 
 hardly be denied, has fallen upon evil ways. There 
 lack npt voices which boldly declare that she has 
 reached the beginning of her end, that the day of 
 her destruction is at hand. Within the camp itself 
 many of her leaders are apologetic, some are shame- 
 faced. And even the remnant, that small band 
 which stiU believes in the life of the spirit, the few 
 faithful, the Uttle leaven that is yet to leaven the 
 whole lump, can hardly in the present time take 
 heart, can hardly yet pluck up courage. Many of 
 those who minister in high places, far from preach- 
 
Comlusion of Whole Matter 235 
 
 ing religion pure and undefiled, listen, as did their 
 predecessors in the time of Isaiah, to a rebelUous 
 people that will not hear the law of the Lord, to 
 wayward children which say to their seers, " See 
 not "; and to their prophets, " Prophesy not unto 
 us right things, speak unto us smooth things, 
 prophesy deceits." Forgetful — often willfully for- 
 getful — that their chief commission is to preach 
 Jesus Christ and Him crucified, they strive to hold 
 their people by giving popular lectures on science 
 for which they are incompetent, on socialism by 
 which they hope to catch the never stable masses, 
 on higher criticism that they may gain a reputation 
 for scholarship, on poHtics that they may be 
 thought practical. Meanwhile, quite as much as 
 in Milton's day, 
 
 " The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." 
 
 They are as a flock without a shepherd. Blind, 
 they are led by the bUnd, and both are in danger of 
 the ditch. Here ritualism has taken the place of 
 righteousness, genuflexion of prayer, candles and 
 chasubles of humbleness of heart; there the 
 measuring of mint and anise and cummin has 
 superseded the weightier matter of justice and 
 mercy and faith; elsewhere phylacteries are made 
 broadj the borders of garments are enlarged, and 
 their wearers using t-ain repetitions, think they 
 shall be heard for their much speaking. Turn 
 where one will, false Christs and false prophets, 
 as was foretold long ago, be-set us; signs and won- 
 
236 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 ders have not failed; wars and rumors of war are 
 on every hand; and some even of the very elect are 
 deceived. 
 
 There is but one path to righteousness, the path 
 of the spirit. Strait is that gate and narrow is that 
 way, and few there be that find it. Only those 
 who become as httle children enter into the king- 
 dom of heaven. Neither science nor culture can 
 meet the needs of their souls, can still the cries of 
 their hearts. For them Earth may fill her lap with 
 pleasures of her own, but as Wordsworth ably 
 maintained in his famous Ode, she never quite 
 succeeds in winning them to herself, though, — 
 
 " Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, 
 And even with something of a mother's mind, and no un- 
 worthy aim, 
 The homely Nurse doth all she can 
 To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, 
 Forget the glories he hath known. 
 And that imperial palace whence he came." 
 
 The trumpets of science attract for a time, the 
 softer music of culture gives ease; but lasting 
 repose is attained only when the voice of the spirit 
 whispers peace. Yet often do those who are of the 
 spirit Usten in vain for the sound of that voice. 
 The Church was once the oracle through which it 
 chiefly spoke; nor, though far too often the words 
 of the priest of today are a confused if not an 
 inarticulate babbling, dare one say that the sacred 
 channel is wholly choked, that the shrines no longer 
 re-echo to the holy message. The Church has not 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 237 
 
 so much lost, as have her ministers deliberately 
 given up an ancient privilege; yet in so doing they 
 have approached perilously near the point where 
 there is danger that the spirit may wholly leave 
 both them and her. That such a catastrophe is 
 inevitable, the little band of the still faithful can- 
 not admit: rather are they confident that they 
 shall yet be vindicated, mindful that though sorrow 
 may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning. 
 Meanwhile help arises elsewhere. Even as 
 Saint Paul, when he addressed the citizens of 
 Athens, did not hesitate to make use of Greek 
 poetry in support of his message, so surely are we at 
 liberty to strengthen our entrenchments by calhng 
 to our aid what our own poets also have said. Nor is 
 it too much to feel that our defence, though similar, 
 is stronger than his. He, speaking to men whom he 
 found ignorantly worshipping at an altar bearing 
 the inscription TO THE UNKNOWN GOD, laid 
 hold upon the words of a pagan writer who, quite 
 as ignorantly as they, had stumbled upon the truth; 
 we, maintaining our position before those who un- 
 derstand our language though they may dissent, or 
 who at least see our position though they may them- 
 selves hold another, seize by right of the apostle's 
 example upon such utterances of our own poets as 
 are, not only plainly religious, but for the most part 
 frankly Christian. For centuries poets without 
 number have recognized how important to the hfe 
 of man is religion in general and Christianity in 
 particular. Of these some have been antagonistic, 
 others have taken the defensive, few have been 
 
238 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 indifferent. Yet it is not by those who are aggres- 
 sively for, or by those who are aggressively against 
 reHgion, much less by those who are cold or luke- 
 warm, that the soul is led into paths of peace. 
 One indeed is not led thither at all; rather he quite 
 unexpectedly finds himself there, surrounded by 
 the voices of many witnesses, witnesses which he 
 knows to be true; for his own soul bears no other 
 testimony than that which they also speak. And 
 of the divers voices rising on every, side, those of the 
 poets, in whom thought and language make one 
 music, sound the fundamental tone. In their 
 words, the perfect vision finds perfect expression, 
 the spirit speaks once more to man. 
 
 God, the poets of this country no less than many 
 in other lands, know by immediate vision, as a 
 personal presence abiding in His world forever. 
 They see in Him the loving Father without whom 
 not a single sparrow falleth, much less one of His 
 children who, we have been told, are of more value 
 than many sparrows. True, not to aU our poets 
 was the same vision given. It may perhaps be 
 truly said that no one of them but has failed to 
 satisfy some reader. The outlook of Poe is too 
 narrow for one, that of Whitman too general for 
 another, that of Emerson too subtle for a third. 
 Again, the slowness with which Bryant came to 
 maturity in his thought of God, the frequently 
 questioning attitude which Lowell assumed in his, 
 and the strongly antagonistic stand which Holmes 
 took towards certain long-ascribed attributes in 
 his, have been known to disturb the tranquillity 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 239 
 
 of some over-sensitive souls, while the readiness 
 with which Longfellow and Whittier accepted 
 traditional views has at least been spoken of in 
 some circles as wholly uncritical. A truce to 
 such quibbles and quiddities! By them is the 
 essential and illuminating thought forgotten, lost 
 indeed in a labyrinth of thinking; by them God 
 becomes a mere word, our thought of Him a mere 
 syllogism. As the poets themselves saw Him, so 
 may we, if we will but follow in their steps. Us also 
 the beatific vision awaits. Guided by them we too 
 may enter into His presence, we too may taste and 
 see and know that the Lord is good. It matters 
 little that Poe was near-sighted, that Emerson's 
 penetration was profound, that the others differed 
 likewise among themselves. That upon which 
 they all looked is the same. In no subtle sense 
 their vision, whatever their point of view, was one. 
 The American poets, however, had no new 
 definition of God to present, nor, as a matter of 
 fact, did any of them ascribe to Him a single 
 attribute not long and widely regarded by others as 
 His. Indeed, it is unsafe to assert that it Ues 
 within the power of man, whatever his inspiration 
 or vision, to make such a definition or to discover 
 such attributes. The advancement of science, 
 it is true, has greatly enlarged our understanding 
 of the methods of God at work in His world, but 
 modern comprehension of Him, whatever gain has 
 been made in details, is not and in all likelihood 
 cannot be essentially different from that possessed 
 of old by those to whom He revealed Himself, 
 
240 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 whether Jews or Gentiles, whether Greeks or 
 Barbarians. It is therefore not the emphasis laid 
 by Bryant upon His power, by Whittier upon His 
 mercy, by Longfellow upon His loving-kindness, 
 which makes those writers helpful in their rehgious 
 thought, neither is it the recognition given by 
 Lowell and Holmes to His infinite goodness and by 
 Emerson and Whitman to His far-reaching domin- 
 ion and might. These attributes, one must freely 
 admit, have been dwelt upon many, many times 
 in far more eloquent words than ever fell from any 
 American poet's hps. Nevertheless, every one of 
 those poets, from wavering Poe to self-confident 
 Whitman, possessed to some degree that lively faith 
 in God which the Christian regards as knowledge 
 indeed. It is little likely that citations from the 
 American poets, however numerous they might 
 be, would convert the atheist — nothing less than 
 a miracle can do that; — but such citations are 
 able to recall the wanderer to his allegiance, to 
 give to the doubter belief; to the weak-hearted, 
 strength; to the faithful, confidence, courage, and 
 hope. Not once but often, as we read the words of 
 the American poets, not rarely but many times, 
 are we made doubly conscious that our hves are 
 passed in the very presence of God; spiritually 
 we see Him face to face, spiritually hear His tender 
 voice, spiritually discern that underneath us are 
 His everlasting arms. Mystic communion with 
 Him is, in those perfect moments, our soul-satisfy- 
 ing lot. Forgetful for the time of all His wondrous 
 might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, we 
 
Conclusion of Whok Matter 241 
 
 become once more as little children, and, as Whit- 
 tier in At School-Close advised, 
 
 " Hold fast the truth that God is good." 
 
 In their attitude toward Christ the poets of 
 America were less sure of themselves, less at one 
 with each other than in their conception of God. 
 Their poetry, as we read it for their thought of 
 Christ, no longer reflects even with varying dis- 
 tinctness a single vision; rather is it plain that the 
 vision which they saw of Him was itself divided. 
 Many theories have been advanced to explain the 
 founder of Christianity. Of these, one is that there 
 never was such a being at all, that Jesus was a 
 myth deliberately manufactured by well-inten- 
 tioned men and ignorantly accepted by their 
 simple disciples. This theory, popular at one 
 time, is no longer held to any wide extent, perhaps 
 not at all; certainly no trace of it is found in 
 American poetry. Another of these explanations 
 is that Jesus was a great teacher of truth, — per- 
 haps the greatest that the world has ever known, — 
 abundantly worthy therefore to be placed beside 
 Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Plato. This, be- 
 yond a doubt, was the attitude of Emerson and 
 Whitman. Still another type of thought is that 
 Jesus, whether His birth is regarded as miraculous 
 or natural, was so endowed with divine attributes 
 that He was in a true sense a new revelation of God 
 to man; transcending, though human, every other 
 human being; shining, indeed, as the Light of the 
 
242 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 World, being indeed, the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life. Here, however widely they differed among 
 themselves, stood Bryant, Lowell, Longfellow, and 
 Hohnes. A fourth theory is that which the Church 
 has always held to be its fundamental doctrine. 
 By it Christ is asserted to be one with the Father, 
 to have coexisted with Him from the beginning, 
 to have emptied Himself by His own free will of 
 His infinite glory and to have become man that 
 He might sacrifice Himself for us and our salvation 
 before He returned again to the bosom of God from 
 whom He came forth. This was the teaching of 
 Saint Paul and Saint John; this has been the beUef 
 of a countless number of men and women extending 
 down through the ages. Not one of oiu: American 
 poets, however, was able to accept the doctrine in 
 its entirety. Longfellow and Whittier and perhaps 
 Bryant stood near enough to be illuminated by its 
 glow; they were, not the less, afar off. 
 
 And indeed the doctrine is hard. It demands 
 an exercise of faith of which but few persons are 
 capable. StiU, once accepted, it removes every 
 difficulty in the way of the triumph of Christianity. 
 If God was morally bound, as Saint Ansehn would 
 have us beheve, to become incarnate, then do the 
 miraculous birth of Jesus, the wondrous works 
 which He performed, His resurrection from the 
 dead. His ascension into Heaven, and His subse- 
 quent appearance to Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, 
 cease to be stumbhng-blocks to the intellect — 
 rather are they a rock of defence to the heart of 
 man. Christ_is then seen as very God and very 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 243 
 
 man. Accepted as the Author and Finisher of our 
 faith, He solves for us, as Browning pointed out in 
 The Death in the Desert, the enigma of this world 
 and gives to every problem of Ufe its final answer. 
 The difficulty of the doctrine is its essential sim- 
 plicity. It is plainly a cutting rather than an 
 untying of the Gordian knot and seems, no doubt, 
 to many a mind no legitimate method of silencing 
 certain grave questions which daily obtrude them- 
 selves upon the soul. The American poets therefore 
 cannot be regarded as having dehberately or per- 
 haps even consciously rejected the true doctrine of 
 the divinity of Christ. Rather do their poems 
 reflect the attitude of many men who shrink with 
 a certain noble fear from too readily admitting that 
 faith and the sensibilities are equally trustworthy 
 with knowledge and the intellect. Be that as it 
 may, the poets of America were never antagonistic 
 in any iconoclastic sense to the fundamental belief 
 of Christianity. If they could not accept it in its 
 entirety, they could not do other than treat it with 
 respect and admit atleast the possibility of its truth. 
 Perhaps, all things considered, their general belief 
 with regard to the founder of Christianity has been 
 best summed up, not by any one of them, but by 
 one of our minor singers, Mr. Richard Watson 
 Gilder: 
 
 • " U Jesus Christ be man, 
 (And only man), I say 
 That of all mankind I will cleave to him, 
 And to him I wUl cleave alway. 
 
244 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 " If Jesus Christ be God, 
 
 (And the only Gtod), I swear 
 I will follow him through heaven and hell, 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
 The doctrine of the personality of the Holy 
 Spirit presents difficulties even greater than those 
 involved in that of the divinity of Christ. Men 
 have ever been prone to think of God as existing 
 in some sense in the form of a human being. It 
 matters httle whether their conception of Him has 
 been frankly anthropomorphic as it was with the 
 Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews; or pantheis- 
 tic as it has been and still is with the Hindoos; 
 or transcendental as Christianity joining hands with 
 certain philosophers has for centuries attempted to 
 teach, the fact remains that when men pray, they 
 bow before a Being who, however infinite they may 
 think Him to be in glory, dominion, and love, is 
 still One in whose image they are made. Again, 
 when men speak of Christ, they are almost certain 
 to picture Him, whatever their beUef, not as the 
 Word which was in the beginning with God, not 
 as the Son eternally existent with the Father, but 
 as Jesus, the son of Mary moving, as Shakespeare 
 wrote three centuries since, 
 
 " amidst those holy fields 
 Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 
 Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed 
 For our advantage on the bitter cross." 
 
 But when men turn their attention to the Holy 
 Spirit, they are perforce less concrete in their 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 245 
 
 thought. They have no authority for thinking of 
 Him as walking in the garden in the cool of the 
 day, or as weeping over the hardened inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem. They know not in what form the 
 Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters 
 or overshadowed the Virgin of Galilee. True, the 
 Scriptures bear witness that the Holy Spirit once 
 descended in a bodily shape like a dove, and again 
 was heard as a rushing mighty wind and appeared 
 as cloven tongues like as of fire, yet the record of 
 these manifestations does not produce a strong 
 conviction of reality. Mind and soul continue to 
 grope after something more real, something suffi- 
 ciently tangible, something sufficiently human, if 
 the word will be allowed, to produce a sense oif true 
 personahty. This doctrine therefore is also hard, 
 so hard in fact that the poets of nearly every age 
 and nationality have left it with the theologians. 
 Nor are the American poets an exception. The 
 doctrine of the personahty of the Holy Spirit is 
 scarcely so much as mentioned by them. Nor, it is 
 perhaps well to assert here, did they undertake in 
 any way to explain the Trinity — that mystic 
 unity of Three in One and One in Three. It is 
 barely spoken of by Longfellow, it is just touched 
 upon, and no more, by Whittier. Clearly our 
 American poets refrained from rushing in where 
 angels themselves might well fear to tread. 
 
 Yet if the poets of America assist but Uttle to an 
 understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity and 
 even less to a sense of the personality of the Holy 
 Spirit, three of them at least, lead us well on the 
 
246 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 way to a knowledge of the work which that Spirit 
 performs in the hearts of men. The Inner-Light 
 of Whittier, the Over-soul of Emerson, and a 
 certain spiritual activity which Whitman recog- 
 nized, but to which he gave no special name, are 
 all manifestations of what the theologian regards 
 as the power of the Holy Ghost. Each of these 
 men professed to hear a voice, and, plainly, each 
 beheved that every man, if he would but listen, 
 could Ukewise hear the same voice urging the soul 
 to eschew evil and to lay hold upon righteousness. 
 Nor was this voice to them but the voice of con- 
 science. It spoke with far greater authority, 
 it presented ideals, the very perception of which 
 carried conviction of their authenticity, it uttered 
 judgments the finahty of which, the poets felt, 
 was not open to question. It was, though Whit- 
 man knew it not, and Emerson scarcely believed, 
 and Whittier hardly dared hope, the Comforter, 
 the Strengthener whom, according to Saint John, 
 our Lord promised He would pray the Father to 
 send that we might be guided into all truth. Of 
 the greatness of their own message, it is safe to say, 
 our three poets had no understa,nding; nor of its 
 import have their readers yet perceived the full 
 value. If their teaching is indeed true, we are 
 ever in the very presence of the holy, blessed, and 
 glorious Trinity. In the hour of need we may 
 lift our prayers to God the Father, sure of His 
 gracious answer to our every petition; in the hour 
 of trial we may lay hold upon God the Son who dur- 
 ing the days of His flesh was in all points tempted 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 247 
 
 like as we are, yet without sin; and in the hour of 
 indecision we may listen to the voice of God, the 
 Holy Ghost, issuing from the oracles within, for our 
 bodies are indeed the temples where He finds a 
 dwelUng place with man. 
 
 Without undertaking to solve the unanswerable 
 question sometimes asked why God, a perfect and 
 self-sufficient being, should have been moved to 
 create imperfect and unsatisfying man, the greater 
 poets of America were without exception agreed 
 that man's destiny, whatever the desire of God, 
 whatever the power of the atonement, whatever 
 the work of the Holy Ghost, lies wholly within his 
 own hands. Quite unconcerned with the inquiries 
 into what extent we are hampered or left free in 
 formulating articles of belief, or in making choice of 
 lines of action, they either clearly implied or openly 
 taught with Tennyson that our wills are our own. 
 How they are so, our poets did not undertake to 
 define any more than did the English poet; but 
 that they are so to make them God's, American 
 poetry of the nineteenth century most distinctly 
 inculcates. The convictions of Poe were, of course, 
 quite as vaguely expressed upon this matter as 
 upon every other which it concerned him to treat; 
 but there is no uncertainty in the tone with which 
 Whittier urged the thought upon man that now is 
 the accepted time, now the moment when he must 
 make his eternal choice of good or evil. That man 
 sometimes does make the better choice, Whittier 
 firmly believed; yet one cannot turn the pages of 
 the Quaker poet without being led back by memory 
 
248 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 to that mighty passage in DeQuincey's Vision of 
 Sudden Death in which the English author pressed 
 the warning lesson home " that for every one of us, 
 through every generation, is repeated the original 
 temptation of Eden; that every one of us . . . 
 has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own 
 individual will, that once again a snare is presented 
 for tempting him into a captivity to a luxury of 
 ruin " and that " every child of our mysterious 
 race " runs the risk of completing for himself " the 
 treason of the aboriginal fall." 
 
 If the contemporaries of Whittier were not so 
 sharply impressed as he with the conviction that 
 we are hourly weighed in the balance, they were 
 not the less possessed of a vivid sense of the neces- 
 sity of responding to the caU of duty, of choosing 
 the good in preference to the evil. They did not 
 stop to quibble over terms, they did not lull them- 
 selves into indifference by giving to Hamlet's 
 raihng words " there is nothing either good or 
 bad, but thinking makes it so " a significance or 
 weight which neither the author nor the speaker 
 intended. On the contrary, they clearly saw that 
 though good and evil are often interpreted at their 
 Common boundary line, no real confusion of the 
 two exists in any weU-constructed mind, that one 
 cannoi be regarded as the mere reverse of the other 
 like the two faces of a coin. The passive hfe, the 
 permitting oneself to be tossed hither and thither 
 by whim, impulse, desire, or passion on the theory 
 that there can be no final distinction between good 
 and evil, was, it is not too much to say, abhorrent 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 249 
 
 at all times to our poets. Aggressive warfare on 
 the side of good was the one lesson which they 
 taught in the matter of conduct. Whitman, it is 
 true, convinced that a marked defect of the Ameri- 
 can mind is its smug priggishness in making moral 
 decisions, ran the gauntlet of much condemnatory 
 criticism in his endeavor to make breadth take the 
 place of narrowness. Nevertheless, Whittier and 
 Whitman were not nearly so far apart as popular 
 opinion still supposes them to have been. Indeed 
 in the matter of conduct, in the matter of choice 
 between good arid evil, Longfellow may perhaps be 
 regarded as having given expression to the thought 
 which all our poets held in common, when he wrote 
 the words, " Life is real, life is earnest." Or if 
 that quotation seems trite or trivial through our 
 long familiarity with it, may we not say that the 
 poets of America were striving, in their way, to 
 preach the attainment of the very ends which 
 Matthew Arnold beUeved could be reached only 
 by the way of culture. True, the English critic 
 was impatient with Puritanism wherever he found 
 it, whether in England or America; yet the fact 
 remains that religion was to our poets every whit 
 what culture was to him — a study of perfection. 
 If he and they had no important terms in common, 
 they could, had they wished, have easily adopted 
 as their motto those words of Bishop Wilson's so 
 much delighted in by Arnold as his slogan: " To 
 make reason and the wiU of God prevail." 
 
 Of evil in another sense, not in that of sin, but 
 in that of pain and suffering on the part of the 
 
250 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 innocent our poets were not unmindful. The 
 question of why one is often the victim of euAdron- 
 ment or why the guiltless are so often forced to 
 bear punishment which it would seem should in all 
 justice be borne by the wicked alone was no less a 
 problem to them than it has always been to thought- 
 ful men and women. Emerson, like Browning 
 and Tennyson, tried to wrestle with it philosophi- 
 cally and felt, hke them, that he had made some 
 advancement when he pointed out that in the long 
 run good triumphs over evil. Vicarious suffering, 
 however, whether voluntarily or involimtarily 
 endured, is hard to bear, — is an evil indeed from 
 more than one point of view. Even our Lord 
 Himself, it may be remembered, asked that the 
 cup might pass from Him. It might almost be 
 concluded, then, that the problem was not less a 
 mystery to Him than to us; and certainly whether 
 it was or was not so, it has always been inscrutable 
 to man. Certain forms of suffering, science has 
 been able to hghten; certain kinds of pain, the mind 
 has learned to control; but suffering and pain still 
 remain with us — seem essential indeed to our 
 progress towards perfection. This presence of 
 evil in the world has made infidels of some men, 
 sceptics and atheists of others. But our poets cast 
 not in their lot with them. Whittier spoke for 
 his fellow writers when, in the presence of pain and 
 grief, he uttered to doubt the rebuking words " I 
 only know that God is good." Convinced of that 
 truth, they could endure all things, they could 
 bravely say " Thy will be done," they could under- 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 251 
 
 stand that scene in Gethsemane when a greater 
 than they, learning that his prayer would not be 
 granted, could yet add " Nevertheless not as I will 
 but as Thou wilt." 
 
 The last enemy, wrote Saint Paul to the Corinth- 
 ians, the last enemy that shall be destroyed is 
 Death. Whether by death the apostle meant the 
 termination of our life in the flesh or that other 
 death which, as the wages of sin, is allotted to many 
 a man while he yet hves, has more than once been 
 questioned. Be the meaning of the passage what 
 it may, the fear of death in the usual significance 
 of the term dogs the footsteps of men and becomes 
 to not a few a horror indeed. Shrinking from death 
 is innate throughout the animal kingdom and may 
 be properly regarded as a preservative instinct 
 implanted by nature. Man has it in common with 
 the lower animals, yet it is not to be the less 
 regarded on that account. If we truly believe that 
 our existence in the flesh is in accordance with the 
 will or even the wish of God, then are we in duty 
 bound to hedge about that existence, lest the 
 imprisoned splendor unduly make its escape, lest, 
 as Browning made his Karshish aptly say, 
 
 " pricks and cracks 
 Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain 
 Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip 
 Back to rejoin its source before the time." 
 
 Truly, therefore, man is responding to a divine 
 impulse when he shuns the paths of death. Too 
 often, however, his faith is whoUy shattered, or at 
 
252 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 least is too nearly shattered when he meets that 
 final adversary in the way, when he fights the last 
 fight, well-knowing that it must end in defeat for 
 him. Man is so constituted in this life that 
 material reaUty gives a sense of security that no 
 spiritual reality can impart. Strive as he may, the 
 hour comes when hope alone is his only support, 
 and its strength proves too often to be but the 
 weakness of a reed. 
 
 Our poets were not different from their feUow- 
 men. They lost not their faith, it is true; they 
 comforted themselves with visions of reunion with 
 those who had before them entered into the halls 
 of death; they beheved, almost without exception, 
 that in some way, in some very true way, they 
 should, as good and faithful servants, enter into 
 the joy of their Lord. Yet to all, except perhaps to 
 Whitman, the grave had for each its sting, and 
 death had for each its victory. It was with regret 
 that they made ready to bid farewell to earth; 
 it was not without fear that they looked forward 
 into the future. It would be unjust to assert of 
 them that they received the levehng stroke with 
 but outwardly stoical firmness, that they only 
 played the hero with a grim determination. That 
 would be to say that their rehgion had failed them 
 at the crucial moment, that they had come to regard 
 faith and hope and behef as all but empty, all but 
 vain. Not one of them, not even Poe, descended 
 to that defeat. Still,, at best, cherish as they would 
 the trust that God in his infinite wisdom doeth all 
 things well and in his unfailing tenderness and 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 253 
 
 mercy provideth an eternal abiding-place for the 
 children of his love, they could not any more than 
 other men see far into the future, could not pene- 
 trate by sight the obscuring mists which Ue upon 
 the paths leading outward from our earthly dwell- 
 ing-places, could not point us superb vistas opening 
 upon bowers of everlasting loveliness, serenity, 
 and peace. Yet beyond the gloom, they not the 
 less trusted that these things are, .trusted so per- 
 fectly, spoke of them with such certainty, that no 
 man but finds in their words help, comfort and 
 cheer; but finds in their manly " ave atque vale " 
 courage, strength, and hope. 
 
 Over none of our poets could Death insultingly 
 boast. Resurgam was their cry, even as they went 
 down before him; and the emblem upon their tombs, 
 though an inverted torch, showed a flame striving 
 upward. However dark the gloom about the 
 path leading onward from the grave, they set their 
 feet therein, full confident that it led some-whither. 
 Questioning, for, Uke Whittier, none of them knew 
 certainly what the future hath of marvel or sur- 
 prise, all gazed forward. One, it is true, was sure 
 of no more than a step or two; others, however, 
 were firm in the belief that the distant prospects 
 to which they lifted their eyes were no deceptive 
 mirage reflected from the past; and one, indeed, 
 wholly undismayed, nay, eager for the outward 
 journey, greeted the unseen with a cheer. Bold 
 in his utterance as a prophet of ancient Israel, 
 Whitman rebuked and still rebukes our little faith, 
 summoning us to lay hold once more upon the things 
 
254 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 that are eternal. Triumphant as the apostle of 
 the Risen Lord, he too uttered the withering chal- 
 lenge, " Grave, where is thy victory, O Death, 
 where is thy sting?" Whitman, the misunderstood, 
 Whitman, the too little respected, taught here his 
 greatest lesson, a lesson which though present in 
 the writings of our other poets, found its perfect 
 utterance in his manly words. Death to him is a 
 mere incident in life. Change though it be, yet 
 a change worthy of comment only in that it fur- 
 nished ati interesting experience to the undying 
 soul. " Has any one," he asks in Song of Myself, 
 
 " Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? 
 I hasten to inform him, it is jiist as lucky to die. 
 All goes forward and outward, nothing collapses, 
 And to die is different from what any one supposed, and 
 luckier." 
 
 In To Think of Time, he exclaims against looking 
 upon death with suspicion; and in Scented Her- 
 bage of My Breast he went still further, demanding, 
 " What indeed is finally beautiful except death and 
 love? " What greater lesson than that has any 
 man to teach? Does not that question, if it is 
 admitted to mean all that Whitman desired it to 
 imply contain the very essence of nearly all^ if 
 indeed not quite all that Christianity has to impart? 
 Within recent years two great ocean hners plying 
 between ports of England and America have sunk 
 beneath the waters of the Atlantic as the result in 
 one case of accident; in the other, of wicked design. 
 The few survivors of each of those heart-breaking 
 
Conclusion of Whole Matter 255 
 
 catastrophes tell us of deeds of heroic self-sacrifice 
 which convince us that the age of chivalry has not 
 yet wholly passed away. Among those deeds one 
 stands forth more beautiful in itself than any poem 
 ever written. Amidst the fearful yet courageous 
 crowd that covered the decks of the sinking Titanic, 
 stood two white-haired persons side by side, one 
 a man whom America -had learned to hold in high 
 respect for his integrity and honor; the other, a 
 woman, his wife. When it became clear that hope 
 for the safety of more than but a few must be 
 abandoned, the man pointed to his companion the 
 way to the Ufa-boats already rapidly loading with 
 their human freight. But she, turning from them, 
 looked into his face and said: " You and I have 
 loved each other from our youth until now. As we 
 have lived all our Uves together, so let us also die." 
 The name of that woman the world no doubt will 
 forget; but the influence of her brave words and 
 loving deed remains, " a good diffused to make 
 undying music through the world." Nor shall 
 the words of another American citizen, lost upon 
 the Lusitania, be Ughtly forgotten. He also was 
 well-known and one whom men delighted to honor. 
 He, like his friends three years before, calmly 
 awaited a fate which in his case overtook a man in 
 the prime of life. To whom in that crowd which 
 surrounded him shall it not be said that he gave 
 courage and hope, when in the very jaws of death, 
 he smiUngly exclaimed, " This is the beautiful 
 adventure? " 
 
 It cannot be asserted that these noble utterances 
 
256 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 from American lips are traceable to any influence 
 which American poets had had upon the speakers. 
 It can be safely said, however, that the writings of 
 our greater poets and the words and deeds of our 
 nobler citizens ever make to the same goal. De- 
 spite all our impulsive and often misdirected 
 enthusiasm, we are essentially a practical people; 
 and despite all our materiahstic and sometimes 
 sordid tendencies, we are fundamentally a reUgious 
 nation. It is only the shallow mind that scofifs 
 at our putting the words In God We Trust upon our 
 pieces of money; the more thoughtful perceive 
 therein a deep significance. If America be indeed 
 the melting pot into which, as Whitman maintained, 
 the older nations must be willing to cast their best 
 that a new power freed of all dross, may arise 
 to rule the world with righteousness and truth; 
 then are we justified in the hope that the practical 
 materiahsm of the future as well as its no less 
 practical spirituahty, not only will be the natural 
 outgrowth of the integrity of noble men who, 
 though busy in the markets, have yet held mere 
 life in itself as far, far less than love and faith; 
 but also will be the glorious fulfilment of visions 
 which, though seen as in a glass darkly, have none 
 the less been truly seen by our clear-eyed, stoutly 
 religious, sincerely reverent American poets. 
 
INDEX OF TOPICS 
 
 Atonement, 39, 144, 247. 
 
 Bible, in Bryant, 11, 19, 29; in 
 Poe, 39-41 ; in Whittier, 78-80, 89 ; 
 in Longfellow, 116, 117, 120, 130; 
 in Holmea, 141; in Lowell, 171, 
 172; in Whitman, 195, 198, 207. 
 208. 
 
 Charity, see Love. 
 
 Christ, 8, and in Bryant, 19, 22, 23, 
 26-28; 241; in Poe, 38, 39; in 
 Emerson, 57-59, 69, 71, 241; in 
 Whittier, 71, 86-90, 242; in 
 Longfellow, 111-114, 116, 120- 
 123, 125, 130-132; in Holmes 
 143-145, 147, 242; in Lowell, 
 173, 174, 242; in Whitman, 195, 
 197,202-205,209,211,241; and 
 235, 241-244, 246. 
 
 Christianity, 2, 3, 9, and in Poe, 
 32, 39; in Longfellow, 130; in 
 Homes, 147; in Lowell, 160, 174; 
 in Whitman, 192, 194, 217; and 
 237, 241, 243, 244, 254. 
 
 Church, 141,171,172,207,234,236. 
 
 Conduct, 1, and in Whittier, 75; 
 in Longfellow, 127; in Lowell, 
 174-181; in Whitman, 215, 221; 
 and 247-249. See also Man, and 
 Character, and LUe. 
 
 Culture, 233, 236, 249. 
 
 Death, in Bryant, 19, 23, 25, 26; 
 in Poe, 41, 43, 252; in Emerson, 
 63, 65; in Whittier, 193; in 
 Longfellow, 134, 135; in Holmes, 
 155; in Lowell, 160; in Whit- 
 man, 187, 224, 252; and 230, 
 251-254. 
 
 Evil, in Bryant, 21; in Emerson, 
 62-64; in Whittier, 85, 97, 250; 
 in Longfellow, 129; in Whitman, 
 203, 215, 217-221; and 248-249. 
 'See also Sin. 
 
 Faith, 3, 8; and in Poe, 32; in 
 Emerson, 49, 66; in Whittier, 
 71)5 72, 101; in LongfeUow, 113, 
 131; in Lowell, 172; in Whit- 
 man, 196, and 230, 252, 256. 
 
 FeeUngs, 3-8, 13, 50, 123, 231. 
 
 God, in Bryant, 15, 17, 19-21, 238, 
 240; in Foe, 35-38, 45, 108, 238, 
 
 239, 240; in Emerson, 49, 50-54, 
 56-61, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 117, 
 145, 238, 239, 240; in Whittier, 
 70, 71, 72, 74, 81-84, 90-94, 105, 
 239, 240; in Longfellow, 110, 111, 
 116,118,120,121,122,129, 145, 
 240; in Holmes, 139, 140, 141, 
 142, 145, 146, 151, 159, 238, 240; 
 in Lowell, 166-170, 238, 240; in 
 Whitman, 187, 194, 199-202, 203, 
 218, 138, 240; and 230, 231, 233, 
 238-241, 242, 244, 246. 
 
 History, in Bryant, 13, 17-19, 23, 
 117; in Whittier, 117; in Long- 
 fellow, 117; in Holmes, 141; in 
 LoweU, 171. 
 
 Holy Spirit, in Bryant, 21, 22; in 
 Poe, 38; in Emerson, 59, 60, 246; 
 in Whittier, 72, 73, 75, 89, 108, 
 246; in LongfeUow, 119; in 
 Holmes, 141, 143; in Wliitman, 
 202, 203, 205-208; and 244-247. 
 
 Idealism, in Emerson, 60-62; in 
 Whitman, 190. 
 
 Immortality, in Bryant, 18, 19, 
 23-31, 66, 106, 164; in Poe, 41- 
 45, 66; in Emerson, 65, 67, 106, 
 164, 230; in Whittier, 90, 101- 
 107, -253; in Longfellow, 116, 
 132-136; in Holmes, 145, 153- 
 157; in Lowell, 159-166, 170; 
 in Whitman, 187, 199, 221-228, 
 230,233; and 251-256. 
 
 Incarnation, in Foe, 39; in Long- 
 fellow, 120; in Holmes, 144. 
 
 Inner Light, 72-75, 77, 79, 89, 205, 
 206, 207, 246. 
 
 Inspiration, 5-9, 49, 192, 227, 234. 
 
 Intellect, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14, 56, 66, 71, 
 107, 109, 123, 196, 208, 231. 
 
 Reason, see Intellect. 
 
 Intuition, 8, 13, 19, 56, 196, 197, 
 233. 
 
 Jesus, see Christ. 
 
 Life, in Bryant, 17, 18, 19, 26; in 
 Poe, 44; in Emerson, 63, 70; in 
 Whittier, 70, 91, 96; in Long- 
 feUow, 110, 124; in LoweU, 117; 
 in Whitman, 187, 189, 154, 221; 
 and 256. 
 
258 Religion in American Poetry 
 
 Love, in Whittier, 91, 93, 97-101; 
 in Longfellow, 130-132; in 
 Holmes, 145, 146, 148-1S2; in 
 Lowell, 174, 175; in Whitman, 
 103, 208, 211, and 256. 
 
 Lord's Supper, 23. 
 
 Man, in Bryant, 13, 16, 17, 26; in 
 Poe, 247; in Emeraon, 49, 57, 58, 
 59, 63, 64, 65, 71; in Whittier, 
 71, 74, 75, 76, 84-86, 94-97, 247, 
 249; in Longfellow, 121, 124- 
 126; in Holmes, 142, 158; in 
 LoweU, 171, 176, 182; in Whit> 
 man, 193, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 
 213, 224, 249; and 247-249. 
 
 Character, 127, 194, 215. 
 
 Materialism, in Emerson, 55, 60; 
 in Whitman, 190, 196, 225, 256. 
 
 Morality, 218. 
 
 Mystidsm, in Emeison, 12, 71; 
 in Whittier, 71. 
 
 Nature, in Bryant, 13, 14-16, IS, 
 19, 23, 26, 117, 118; in Poe, 37; 
 in Emerson, 49, 51, 53-57, 60, 61; 
 in Whittier, 81-84, 86, 89, 104, 
 117; in Longfellow, 117-119; in 
 Holmes, 141; in Lowell, 167, 171 ; 
 in Whitman, 216. 
 
 Over-Soul, 59, 70, 205, 246. 
 
 Paganism, in Bryant, 15; in Poe, 
 32; in Lowell, 170. 
 
 Pantheism, 50, 51, 53, 70, 83, 183, 
 190. 
 
 Phllotophy, In Emerson, 49, SO, 
 52,61,71,108,190,250; in Whit- 
 man, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 818, 
 244. 
 
 Poetry and Religion, 4, 237. 
 
 Prayer, in Bryant, 12; in Poe, 48, 
 45; in Emerson, 53; in Long- 
 fellow, 111, 116; in Holmes, 139, 
 147, 148. 
 
 Religion, defined for this study, 
 1-3; its relationship to Poetry, 
 3-9 ; place held in Bryant, 10-13, 
 71, 72, 75, 109, 115; in Poe, 32, 
 33, 109, 185; in Emerson, 12, 49, 
 66, 109, 115; in Whittier, 76-78, 
 94, 109, 115; in l,ongfellow, 108, 
 116, 120, 123; in Holmes, 138, 
 142, 145; in LoweU, 159, 172; 
 in Whitman, 185, 186, 187, 189, 
 190, 191, 192-197, 204, 209, 213, 
 215, 224; and 229, 23S, 256. 
 
 Satan, 203. 
 
 Scepticism, 8, 9, 107, 140, 230. 
 
 Scriptures, see Bible. 
 
 Science, 3, 4, 8, 52, 83, 99, 167, 193, 
 196, 197, 198, 214, 223, 231, 232, 
 233, 236. 
 
 Sin, 30, 63, 73, 95, 97, 217, 249. 
 
 Soul, in Bryant, 13, 14, 19; in 
 Emerson, 49, 60; in Whittier, 
 75; in Lowell, 177, 178, 180; in 
 Whitman, 187, 196, 197, 199, 206, 
 297, 218, 220, and 232. 
 
 Spirit, 60, 62, 88, 92, 236, 238. 
 
 Theism, 38, 52, 53, 190. 
 
 Theology, 3, 4, 5, 8, 123, 214, 229, 
 231. 
 
 Trinity, in Bryant, 22, 119; in 
 Foe, 38; in Emeison, 57, 59; in 
 Whittier, 80, 89, 119, 245; in 
 Longfellow, 119, 245; in Whit- 
 man, 203, 208, and 246. 
 
 Truth, in Whittier, 84, 95; in 
 Longfellow, 109; in Holmes, 
 142, 143; in Lowell, 172; in 
 Whitman, 217.