.. the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away."
Like most Puritans, Longfellow is usually over-anxious to teach a lesson;
but the world must learn, and no one has surpassed him as a poetic teacher
of the masses.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892
[Illustration: JOHN G. WHITTIER]
Life.--Whittier says that the only unusual circumstance about the migration
of his Puritan ancestor to New England in 1638 was the fact that he brought
over with him a hive of bees. The descendants of this very hive probably
suggested the poem, _Telling the Bees_, for it was an old English custom to
go straightway to the hive and tell the bees whenever a member of the
family died. It was believed that they would swarm and seek another home if
this information was withheld. The poet has made both the bees and the
snows of his northern home famous. He was born in 1807 in the same house
that his first American ancestor built in East Haverhill, about thirty-two
miles northwest of Boston. The Whittiers were farmers who for generations
had wrung little more than a bare subsistence from the soil.
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