27. Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun To-morrow will be another day; 28. Cradled and rocked in Eastern seas, Beneath me lie; o'er lake and plain The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift 350 355 360 365 With sunshine streaming through each rift, 29. All the bright flowers that fill the land, The snow on Fusiyama's cone, 370 The midnight heaven so thickly sown With constellations of bright stars, The leaves that rustle, the reeds that make A whisper by each stream and lake, The saffron dawn, the sunset red, Are painted on these lovely jars; 370. Fusiyama's cone. Fusiyama is a volcano in Japan, held by the Japanese in religious veneration. LITERARY ANALYSIS.-353-355. Will search... clay. Is this literal or figurative? 365. Cloud-cloisters... lie. Explain. 376. Are painted. What is the compound subject of this verb? 375 LITERARY ANALYSIS. - 378, 379. The stork... overhead. lines 359, 360. Compare with 382. Art is the child, etc. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 20.)— How is the figure carried out in the subsequent lines? 390-392. He is... Nature. Analyze this sentence. 392-399. Never man... leads. Transpose into the prose order, supplying the ellipsis.-Point out a metaphor in this passage. 404-406. When... noon. What circumstance is deftly introduced by the poet to break his reverie? The church bell from the neighboring town And ended thus his simple song: 32. Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon, Too soon to-day be yesterday: Behind us in our path we cast LITERARY ANALYSIS.-412-418. Stop... clay! Point out examples of iteration.-Point out a metaphor.-As a closing study the stanzas embodying the song of the Potter may be read by themselves consecutively. 405 410 415 John & Whittin CHARACTERIZATION BY DAVID WASSON.' 1. Whittier has not the liberated, light-winged, Greek imagination-imagination not involved and included in the religious sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpreta 492 WASSON'S CHARACTERIZATION OF WHITTIER. tion between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean, imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all forms of character and life which culminated in Shakespeare; but that imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what we may call ideal force of heart. This he has eminently; and it is this central, invisible, Semitic heat which makes him a poet. 2. Imagination exists in him not as a separable faculty, but as a pure, vital suffusion. Hence he is an inevitable poet. There is no drop of his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is, indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligibly susceptible to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and imagination. Whoever has common-sense and a sound heart has the powers by which he may be appreciated. And yet he is not only a real poet, but he is all poet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was baptized by immersion. His notes are not many, but in them Nature herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps on a bush, not a lark that floods with orient hilarity the skies of morning; but the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is part of the divine flame. 3. This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is Hebrew Biblical-more so than that of any other poet now using the English language. In other words, he is organically a poem of the Will. He is a flower of the moral sentiment, and of the moral sentiment not in its flexible, feminine, vine-like dependence and play, but in its masculine rigor, climbing in direct, vertical affirmation, like a forest pine. In this respect he affiliates with Wordsworth and, going farther back, with Milton, whose tap-root was Hebrew, though in the vast epic flowering of his genius he passed beyond the imaginative range of the Semitic mind. 4. In thus identifying our bard, spiritually, with a broad form of the genius of mankind, we already say with emphasis that his is indeed a Life. Yes, once more, a real Life. He is a nature. He was born, not manufactured. Here, once again, the old, mysterious, miraculous processes of spiritual assimilation. Here a |