From the moment of the publication of his second volume of poems,
Whittier felt himself fairly launched upon a new career, and seemed to
stand with a responsive audience before him. The poems "Toussaint
L'Ouverture," "The Slave-Ships," and others belonging to the same
period, followed in quick succession. Sometimes they took the form of
appeal, sometimes of sympathy, and again they are prophetic or
dramatic. He hears the slave mother weep:--
"Gone--gone--sold and gone
To the rice-swamp dank and lone,
From Virginia's hills and waters--
Woe is me, my stolen daughters!"
Such voices could not be silenced. Though men might turn away and
refuse to read or to listen, the music once uttered rang out into the
common air, and would not die.
A homely native wit pointed Whittier's familiar correspondence.
Writing in 1849, while revising his volume for publication, he speaks
of one of his poems as "that rascally old ballad 'Kathleen,'" and adds
that it "wants something, though it is already too long." He adds:
"The weather this morning is cold enough for an Esquimau purgatory--
terrible. What did the old Pilgrims mean by coming here?"
With the years his friendship with his publisher became more intimate.
In writing him he often indulged his humor for fun and banter:
"Bachelor as I am, I congratulate thee on thy escape from single
(misery!) blessedness. It is the very wisest thing thee ever did. Were
I autocrat, I would see to it that every young man over twenty-five
and every young woman over twenty was married without delay.
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