Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier

One of the very ablest of New England critics, a man hindered only by prolonged ill-health from taking a conspicuous leadership, David Atwood Wasson, himself the author of that noble poem with its seventeenth-century flavour, “All's well,” wrote in 1864 in the Atlantic Monthly what is doubtless the profoundest study of Whittier's temperament and genius. From this I gladly quote some passages:--

“It was some ten years ago,” he writes,

that we first met John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet of the moral sentiment and of the heart and faith of the people of America. It chanced that we had been making notes, with much interest, upon the genius of the Semitic nations. That peculiar simplicity, centrality, and intensity which caused them to originate Monotheism from two independent centres, the only systems of pure Monotheism which have had power in history, while the same characteristics made their poetry always lyrical, never epic or dramatic, and their most vigorous thought a perpetual sacrifice on the altars of the will, this had strongly impressed us; and we seemed to find in it a striking contrast to the characteristic genius of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic nations, with their imaginative interpretations of the religious sentiment, with their epic and dramatic expansions, and their taste for breadth and variety. Somewhat warm with these notions we came to a meeting with our poet, and the first thought on seeing him was-- “The head of a Hebrew prophet!” It is not Hebrew — Saracen rather — the Jewish type is heavier, more material; but it corresponded strikingly to the conceptions we had formed of the Southern Semitic crania, and the whole make of the man was of the same character. The high cranium, so lofty, especially in the dome — the slight and symmetrical backward slope of the whole head — the powerful level brows, and beneath these the dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire — the Arabian complexion — the sharp-cut, intense lines