50 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
18. Typically the fact that there was no moral or religious consolation
attached bothered Whittier. And he wrote to Lowell about it:
“I send thee a bit of rhyme which pleases me, and yet I am
not quite sure about it. What I call simplicity may be only
silliness. . . . But I like it and hope better things of it.” Quoted
in Samuel T. Pickard’s Life and Letters of John Greenleaf
Whittier (Boston, 1907), p. 414.