George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him crazy, as half-truths are wont.  But the inward light, whatever else it might be, was surely not of that kind “that never was on land or sea.”  There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in the men themselves.  Poetry demands a richer and more various culture, and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of the same mineral.  Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker.  Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.

Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she made a General of Greene.  To make a New England poet, she had her choice between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker.  He is, on the whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced.  He sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery.  He has not forgiven the Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires them for all that, calls on his countrymen as

  Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
  Answering Charles’s royal mandate with a stern “Thus saith the Lord,”

and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than with Mary Dyer.  Indeed,

  Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o’er their brow,
  Answering Charles’s royal mandate with a thee instead of thou,

would hardly do.  Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit that he smacks of the soil.  It is a New England heart he buttons his straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now and then.  Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses.  He makes abroad rhyme with God, law with war, us with curse, scorner with honor, been with men, beard with shared.  For the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest we can make no terms whatever,—­they must march out with no honors of war.  The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give a flavor of essence-pennyr’y’l to the very Beatitudes.  It differs from Lowland Scotch as a patois from a dialect.