"'How cold, how beautiful, how bright The cloudless heaven above us shines; But 'tis a howling winter's night,-- 'Twould freeze the very forest pines.
'The winds are up while mortals sleep; The stars look forth while eyes are shut; The bolted snow lies drifted deep Around our poor and lonely hut.
'With silent step and listening ear, With bow and arrow, dog and gun, We'll mark his track, for his prowl we hear, Now is our time--come on, come on.'
O'er many a fence, through many a wood, Following the dog's bewildered scent, In anxious haste and earnest mood, The Indian and the white man went.
The gun is cock'd, the bow is bent, The dog stands with uplifted paw; And ball and arrow swift are sent, Aim'd at the prowler's very jaw.
--The ball, to kill that fox, is run Not in a mould by mortals made! The arrow which that fox should shun Was never shap'd from earthly reed!
The Indian Druids of the wood Know where the fatal arrows grow-- They spring not by the summer flood, They pierce not through the winter snow!"[12]
[Footnote 12: Mr. Whittier quotes this fine ballad in Vol. II. p. 243 of his prose works, but with numerous changes of punctuation and phrase. The differences between the poem as it there appears and as it is given in his own edition of Brainard, published in 1832, seem to show that he has amended the ballad and punctuated it to suit himself, or else has quoted it from memory, or at third or fourth remove. It must be admitted that the changes are all improvements, however they were made. The ballad is quoted above, however, as it appears in Brainard's Poems.]
Whittier's Introduction to Brainard's poems reveals a mind matured by much reading and thought. We hardly recognize in the author and editor of Hartford the shy girlish boy we so recently left on the farm at Haverhill. There has evidently been a good deal of midnight oil burned since then.
The following sentiments respecting the resources and the proper field of the American poet show that thus early had Whittier taken the manly and patriotic resolution to find in his native land the chief sources of poetic inspiration: "It has been often said that the New World is deficient in the elements of poetry and romance; that its bards must of necessity linger over the classic ruins of other lands; and draw their sketches of character from foreign sources, and paint Nature under the soft beauty of an Eastern sky. On the contrary, New England is full of romance; and her writers would do well to follow the example of Brainard. The great forest which our fathers penetrated, the red men, their struggle and their disappearance, the powwow and the war-dance, the savage inroad and the English sally, the tale of superstition and the scenes of witchcraft,--all these are rich materials of poetry. We have, indeed, no classic vale of Tempe, no haunted Parnassus, no temple gray with years, and hallowed by the gorgeous pageantry of idol worship, no towers and castles over whose moonlight ruins gathers the green pall of the ivy; but we have mountains pillaring a sky as blue as that which bends over classic Olympus, streams as bright and beautiful as those of Greece and Italy, and forests richer and nobler than those which of old were haunted by sylph and dryad."