36 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
tion of ideas with visual, concrete detail. Also he draws
heavily on the familiar objects of farm and nature as source
material for his poetry. These characteristics were also to be
Whittiefs when he had achieved a truth of style.
However, Burns’ steadying influence was lost as Whittier
succumbed to the third influence of his immature years. The
lure of the exotic, the mysterious, and the romantic in the
works of Scott and Byron captured his imagination;6 while
their American counterparts, Mrs. Sigoumey and N. P. Willis,
excited his interest in sentimental and exaggerated love
themes and led him to imitate their affected literary style.7
Fortunately most of these attempts were only passing fads,
but the presence of so many of these poems illustrates how
susceptible Whittier was to popular taste. Their themes, lost
love, desire for fame, melancholy, praise of tire imagination
and poetry, are significant, for they indicate how far Whit-
tier had come from the strict Quaker view that art must be
practical and, above all else, moral. Again, one of the main
tensions in his literary career is put in focus, the lure of
beauty in its own sphere against a moralistic view of art.
From earliest childhood Whittier has been rigorously trained
to believe that sensuous beauty and the fine arts drew men
away from spiritual goodness, The Quaker attitude on the
arts was a negative one, a series of do not read novels, do not
attend the theatre, do not listen to music—all of which was
grounded in their belief that the human impulses of man
were divorced from the Divine. Like the early Puritans they
feared that a delight in sensuous beauty would replace the
“inner light” of spiritual perfection. So Whittier’s earliest
writings stressed the beauty of “a spirit of a higher mould—
A being un allied to earth”8 and emphasized beauty’s holiness
and sanctity. Yet, his imitations of Byron and Willis show