Among the Hills, and other poems Part 5 From Volume I of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier — Text and Context

Stillness and Sound in the Prelude

The prelude is built on contrasts between motion and stillness. The wind is 'unfelt' yet a maple leaf 'with faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams, confesses it.' The hay-cart creaks slowly, the driver asleep. The sheep show white 'as if a snowdrift still defied the dog-star.' These images create a suspended, drowsy atmosphere. The speaker then shifts to a moral reflection: the 'stress and strain of years that did the work of centuries have ceased,' allowing him to 'idly turn the leaves of memory's sketch-book.' This framing suggests the poem will be a series of recollections, not a continuous narrative.

The Debate on Faith and Science

Later in the excerpt, the speaker engages in a philosophical argument about religion and modernity. He declares, 'Nor fear I aught that science brings from searching through material things,' and insists that 'the eternal spirit of the Lord' is present everywhere. He rejects mourning over 'some hopeless flaw in the stone tables of the law' because 'scripture every day afresh is traced on tablets of the flesh.' This section uses a series of balanced couplets to assert that faith and reason can coexist, with 'reason stoops its pride to share the child-like instinct of a prayer.'

The Tale of Shah Akbar

The speaker then tells 'a story of the days of old, not found in printed books'—a 'fancy, with slight hint of truth' about the Mughal emperor Akbar. The scene shifts abruptly to Agra at sunset, with 'the marble wonder of some holy dome hung a white moonrise over the still wood.' Akbar, weary from hearing 'wild cries for justice' and 'the strife of sect and creed and rite,' retreats to his harem. He listens to a woman singing songs of a 'far land where Tagus shatters on the salt sea-sand.' The emperor, who 'left his people free' and hoped all paths of faith 'met at the gate of Paradise at last,' embodies tolerance.

Movement Between Worlds

The poem's structure relies on abrupt geographical and temporal shifts. From a New England hay-field, the speaker moves to 'the Mogul's marble floor' and the Jumna river. The transition is marked by a change in light: 'the sky had golden grown, our faces in its glory shone; but shadows down the valley swept.' The description of Akbar's palace emphasizes water—'the cool sound of the fall of fountains, and of water circling free through marble ducts'—contrasting with the earlier dry, hot landscape. These shifts suggest that the poem's unity comes not from plot but from a meditative voice that ranges across cultures and eras.

Readers should attend to how Whittier uses the prelude's sensory details—the smell of heliotrope, the creak of a cart—to ground his philosophical digressions. The poem's movement from local to exotic, from personal memory to historical anecdote, reflects a 19th-century interest in comparative religion and the unity of human experience. The excerpted sections show a poet balancing descriptive precision with abstract argument, often within a single stanza.

That grey afternoon, Whittier’s quiet shift from hayfields to Akbar’s court felt like rain moving across a window. I closed the book, wanting that same unhurried drift — how a landscape can hold a question. Later, I found it again in Gloucester Moors and Other Poems — Key Ideas to Explore, where the sea takes over the thinking, just as gently. A different coast, same weather.