"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. Perhaps, on second thought, it might be well to keep one old maid and one old bachelor in each town, by way of warning, just as the Spartans did their drunken helots."
Discussing the question of some of his "bad rhymes," and what to do about them, he wrote once: "I heartily thank thee for thy suggestions. Let me have more of them. I had a hearty laugh at thy hint of the 'carnal' bearing of one of my lines. It is now simply _rural._ I might have made some other needful changes had I not been suffering with headache all day."
Occasionally the fire which burned in him would flame out, as when he writes in 1851: "So your Union-tinkers have really caught a 'nigger' at last! A very pretty and refreshing sight it must have been to Sabbath-going Christians yesterday--that _chained_ court-house of yours. And Bunker Hill Monument looking down upon all! But the matter is too sad for irony. God forgive the miserable politicians who gamble for office with dice loaded with human hearts!"
From time to time, also, we find him expressing his literary opinions eagerly and simply as friend may talk with friend, and without aspiring to literary judgment. "Thoreau's 'Walden' is capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs."