_Maud Muller_, _Skipper Iresons Ride_,
_Cassandra Southwick_, _Barbara Frietchie_, and _Mabel Martin_ are among
the best of these.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS--Whittier and Longfellow resemble each other in
simplicity. Both are the poets of the masses, of those whose lives most
need the consolation of poetry. Both suffer from diffuseness, Whittier in
his greatest poems less than Longfellow. Whittier was self-educated, and he
never traveled far from home. His range is narrower than Longfellow's, who
was college bred and broadened by European travel. But if Whittier's poetic
range is narrower, if he is the poet of only the common things of life, he
shows more intensity of feeling. Often his simplest verse comes from the
depths of his heart. He wrote _In School Days_ forty years after the grass
had been growing on the grave of the little girl who spelled correctly the
word which the boy had missed:--
"'I'm sorry that I spelt the word:
I hate to go above you,
Because,'--the brown eyes lower fell,--
'Because you see, I love you!'
* * * * *
"He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her,--because they love him.
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