John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier (17 December 1807 – 7 September 1892) was an American Quaker poet and abolitionist.

Quotes

Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag…

Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there.

When faith is lost, when honor dies
The man is dead!

Their right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread arbitrament of war. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge, and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prison ship.

Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.
- Barbara Frietchie (1863); reported in Diane Ravitch, The American Reader: words that moved a nation (2000), p. 259. The lines are based on an folkloric account of the real Barbara Fritchie, said to have made a similar challenge to Confederate invaders of Maryland during the American Civil War.

The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
- My Psalm, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,—generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.
- The Beautiful, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

O, brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
where pity dwells, the peace of God is there.
- Worship, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Press bravely onward! — not in vain
Your generous trust in human kind;
The good which bloodshed could not gain
Your peaceful zeal shall find.
- To the Reformers of England, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore;
The glory from his gray hairs gone
For evermore!
- Ichabod, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

When faith is lost, when honor dies
The man is dead!
- Ichabod, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Making their lives a prayer.
- To A. K. On receiving a Basket of Sea-Mosses, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry;
Blot out the epic’s stately rhyme,
But spare his "Highland Mary!"
- Line on Burns, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good.
- Brown of Ossawatomie, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The hope of all who suffer,
The dread of all who wrong.
- The Mantle of St. John de Matha, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.
- The eternal Goodness, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Again the shadow moveth o'er
The dial-plate of time.
- The New Year, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Yet sometimes glimpses on my sight,
Through present wrong the eternal right;
And, step by step, since time began,
I see the steady gain of man;
- The Chapel of the Hermits, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

We lack but open eye and ear
To find the Orient's marvels here;
The still small voice in autumn's hush,
Yon maple wood the burning bush.
- The Chapel of the Hermits; comparable to Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book vii

Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart.
- Mary Garvin, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.
- Mary Garvin, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The Night is Mother of the Day,
The Winter of the Spring,
And ever upon old Decay
The greenest mosses cling.
- A Dream of Summer, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Beauty seen is never lost.
- Sunset on the Bearcamp, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

God blesses still the generous thought,
And still the fitting word He speeds,
And Truth, at His requiring taught,
He quickens into deeds.
- Channing, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Each crisis brings its word and deed.
- The lost Occasion, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The Beauty which old Greece or Rome
Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home.
- To ———, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

We seemed to see our flag unfurled,
Our champion waiting in his place
For the last battle of the world,
The Armageddon of the race.
- Rantoul, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.
- To Charles Sumner, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Who never wins can rarely lose,
Who never climbs as rarely falls.
- To James T. Fields, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

To eat the lotus of the Nile
And drink the poppies of Cathay.
- The Tent on the Beach, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.
- The Worship of Nature, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day
Were the truths of long ago.
- Calef in Boston, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Low stir of leaves and dip of oars
And lapsing waves on quiet shores.
- Snow Bound, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

All hearts confess the saints elect,
Who, twain in faith, in love agree,
And melt not in an acid sect
The Christian pearl of charity!
- Snow Bound, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life is ever lord of Death
And Love can never lose its own.
- Snow Bound, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Let the thick curtain fall;
I better know than all
How little I have gained,
How vast the unattained.
- My Triumph, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sweeter than any sung
My songs that found no tongue;
Nobler than any fact
My wish that failed of act.

Others shall sing the song,
Others shall right the wrong,—
Finish what I begin,
And all I fail of win.
- My Triumph, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

God is and all is well.
- My Birthday'', reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare Browning, Pippa Passes.

Their right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread arbitrament of war. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge, and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prison ship.
- Quoted in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, by William Cooper Nell, p. 339. (1855)

The laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed
And close as sin and suffering joined
We march to fate abreast.
- "At Port Royal"

Maud Muller (1856)

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune.

He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go:
And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.

A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, "It might have been".

Weary lawyers with endless tongues.

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
- Bret Harte wrote a famous parody of this famous poem, "Mrs. Judge Jenkins" in which the Judge marries Maud, and which he ends with the lines:
  Maud soon thought the Judge a bore,
  With all his learning and all his lore;
  And the Judge would have bartered Maud's fair face
  For more refinement and social grace.
  If, of all words of tongue and pen,
  The saddest are, "It might have been,"
  More sad are these we daily see:
  "It is, but hadn't ought to be".

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late,
They touch the shining hills of day;
The evil cannot brook delay,
The good can well afford to wait.
- P. 282

As yonder tower outstretches to the earth
The dark triangle of its shade alone
When the clear day is shining on its top;
So, darkness in the pathway of man's life
Is but the shadow of God's providence,
By the great Sun of wisdom cast thereon;
And what is dark below is light in heaven.
- P. 282

For they the mind of Christ discern
Who lean, like John, upon His breast.
- P. 399

Strike! Thou the Master, we Thy keys,
The anthem of the destinies!
The minor of Thy loftier strain,
Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain —
"Thy will be done!"
- P. 513

Attributed

Somehow not only for Christmas
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart's possessing
Returns to make you glad.
- First published in The Educational Monthly of Canada, Volume 24‎ (1901), p. 29

Quotes about John Greenleaf Whittier

In the poem of 'Snow-Bound' there are lines on the death of the poet's sister which have nothing superior to them in beauty and pathos in our language. I have read them often with always increasing admiration. I have suffered from the loss of those near and dear to me, and I can apply the lines to my own case and feel as if they were written for me. 'The Eternal Goodness' is another poem which is worth a crowd of sermons which are spoken from the pulpits of our sects and churches, which I do not wish to undervalue. It is a great gift to mankind when a poet is raised up among us who devotes his great powers to the sublime purpose of spreading among men principles of mercy and justice and freedom. This our friend Whittier has done in a degree unsurpassed by any other poet who has spoken to the world in our noble tongue. I feel it a great honor that my bust should stand in your hall near the portrait of your great poet.
- John Bright, letter to the presentation of Edgar Parker's portrait of Whittier to the Friends' School at Providence (1884), quoted in Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume II (1894), pp. 704-705

Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)

I have in my hand a poem which our own beloved poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote almost fifty years ago, in the darkest hour of the midnight which brooded over our country. You are most of you, perhaps all, familiar with it. It is addressed to Mr. Garrison. Shall I read a single stanza? I do it to illustrate a point strongly put by our brother who has just taken his seat; that is, the power of a single soul, alone, of a single soul touched with sacred fire, a soul all of whose powers are enlisted the thought, the feeling, the susceptibility, the emotion, the indomitable will, the conscience that never shrinks, and always points to duty-I say, the power which God has lodged in the human mind, enabling to do and to dare and to suffer everything, and thank God for the privilege of doing it. To show also how, when one soul is thus stirred in its innermost and to its uttermost, it is irresistible; that wherever there are souls, here and there, and thick and fast, too, not merely one, and another, and another, of the great mass, but multitudes of souls are ready to receive the truth and welcome it, to incorporate it into their thought and feeling, to live and die for it. That was the effect of Garrison upon the soul of Whittier. He here gives us his testimony. The date of this is 1833-almost fifty years ago. He says in the third stanza: "I love thee with a brother's love,/I feel my pulses thrill/To mark thy spirit soar above/The cloud of human ill./My heart hath leaped to answer thine,/And echo back thy words,/As leaps the warrior's at the shine/And flash of kindred swords!"
- Theodore Dwight Weld, eulogy for William Lloyd Garrison (1879)

The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade.
- Ida B. Wells, The Red Record (1895)