Wit & Attitude Quote by John Greenleaf Whittier

Whittier draws a clean moral line with the kind of calm confidence that only a 19th-century reform poet could afford: let the loud people have their prizes. “Fools” can keep their glitter, “knaves” their authority; those rewards are “fortune’s bubbles,” gaudy and temporary, destined to pop. The bite is in the dismissal. Whittier doesn’t argue with corrupt systems on their own terms; he shrugs at them, treating wealth and political dominance as inherently unstable forms of status. That’s not naivete, it’s strategy: diminish the charisma of power by recasting it as froth.

Then the poem pivots from critique to alternative, and the alternative is stubbornly practical. Sowing, training, planting: verbs of patience, labor, and time horizons longer than an election cycle or a market spike. Whittier elevates cultivation as a civic and spiritual act, a quiet rebellion against a culture that crowns the slick and punishes the steady. The subtext is abolitionist-era ethics without the pamphlet tone: real worth is measured by what you make possible for others, not what you seize for yourself.

Context matters. Whittier, a Quaker-leaning activist-poet, wrote in an America convulsed by expansion, industrial capitalism, and political rot. In that world, “more than all” lands as a rebuke to the era’s swaggering winners and a rallying point for the builders, growers, and reformers whose work rarely looks like triumph until years later.