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27. Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,

To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay.

28. Cradled and rocked in Eastern seas,
The islands of the Japanese

Beneath me lie; o'er lake and plain
The stork, the heron, and the crane
Through the clear realms of azure drift,
And on the hill-side I can see

The villages of Imari,

Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift
Their twisted columns of smoke on high,
Cloud-cloisters that in ruins lie,

350

355

360

365

With sunshine streaming through each rift,
And broken arches of blue sky.

29. All the bright flowers that fill the land,
Ripple of waves on rock or sand,

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;
Again the skylark sings, again

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

[blocks in formation]

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
Proclaimed the welcome hour of noon.
The Potter heard, and stopped his wheel,
His apron on the grass threw down,
Whistled his quiet little tune
Not overloud nor overlong,

And ended thus his simple song:

32. Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon,
The noon will be the afternoon,

Too soon to-day be yesterday:

Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the Past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay!

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

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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

From the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1864.

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

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