It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding
it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained
in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig
journalist, of the ostracism visited upon the active
Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with absolute courage
and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons and tactics.
He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields of
New England legend and history to which he was destined to return
after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the prose of
Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in the
United States was only a single and immediate phase of a
universal movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his
imagination. He wrote, at white heat, political and social verse
that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in praise of
fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns,
satires against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional
poems like "Massachusetts to Virginia," and, more nobly still,
poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image
of country and the human race.
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