Part 5

“With warning hand I mark Time’s rapid flight.”

In regard to this inscription, Dr. Henry I. Bowditch wrote his friend in Amesbury--Whittier’s physician--under date of December 30, 1854:

“Warm regards to Whittier, and tell him I still _hope_ for the inscription for my old dial--that is, I wish if you have a fair chance you would _gently allude_ to my hopes; but, pray, do not let him think me troublesome about it. I think I could get one from H----, or F----, but I would prefer Whittier to any other that I know.”

Apparently, the “gentle allusion” must have been made with success--judging from the following extract of January fifteenth, 1855, about two weeks later. “The more I read Whittier’s lines,” wrote Bowditch to the doctor, “the more I admire them. Everybody is delighted with them, and I am obliged to give copies in every direction.”

With Bowditch’s noble character, his delightful enthusiasm and anti-slavery zeal, his frankness and charm, it was not to be wondered at that the admiration of the two men was reciprocal. There comes to mind the speech of the poet, after looking long and earnestly at a photograph of Dr. Bowditch. He glanced up at last to say that it made him think of one of the old Greek fathers.

* * * * *

Those who knew Whittier well remember the suddenness of his leave-takings. For, no matter how tranquilly he was seated and how absorbed in his subject he appeared, one could never be sure that the next moment he would not rise, make his adieus, and be off, all in a breath.

Somebody asked him one day why he always took leave so suddenly? He answered that the habit came from early training, that his father did not like prolixity--no, nor did his father’s son! Indeed, one day Whittier talking of himself, said that as he grew older he could perceive traits of his father coming out more strongly in himself.

It was the same way with his journeys. An announcement at the breakfast table would often be the first intimation that his bag was packed for the next train. That alertness distinguished him to the very last. He knew what he wanted and went straight to the mark.

* * * * *

Yet when in pursuance of his object, the success of the anti-slavery movement, or helping to plan and organize that party to which slavery owed its downfall, no one could navigate the troubled waters of politics and tack to fill the sails or avoid the flaws with more skill than Whittier. The power to manipulate men he had to a degree that would have made him dangerous but for his high principle. For with him honor was always first.

He never lost interest in politics in its highest sense, nor failed in his part as freeman and patriot. In 1883 he wrote:

“I have been ill almost ever since the first of September. I managed to go to the Convention at Boston and staid only long enough to vote for Robinson, after which I was ill and sleepless for four days and nights----more than one hundred and twenty hours in all. I am now somewhat better and shall go to Amesbury this week.”

XVI

In the long winter evenings when the poet’s niece was away at boarding school and storm or some other cause for dearth of visitors had left him and his housekeeper alone together, and his eyes would not permit him to read, or, perhaps when he strove to banish care and pain and the memory of his loss, he would sometimes entertain himself and this Scotswoman with stories.

The more absurd these were, the better for him. On occasions they were witch stories, the most horrible New England legends that memory could recall from his extensive reading and his imagination color with new vividness. In the telling of them, manner, tone, words--all would combine to make her flesh creep and her hair stand on end.

At last she would laugh.

Then he would turn upon her with assumed severity. “Margaret, don’t thee believe it?”

“Did you see it, Mr. Whittier?” she would demand, concerning some marvellous vision of the unknown upon which he had been dilating.

“No,” he would confess. “But they told me it was so.”

And he would join in her mirth.

To this never failing sense of humor Whittier owned somewhat of the clearness of his mental outlook, and much of his power of retort.

* * * * *

But there is something infinitely touching in this trying to make the best of things as he sat by his lonely fireside with the world applauding him.

* * * * *

In the winter of 1866-67, being detained in Boston by a very severe snow-storm, he wrote to this same housekeeper: “I’m waiting for proofs of ‘Tent on the Beach.’ Live sumptuously; patronize the butcher and baker; and take good care of Charlie [the parrot]; and I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

On his arrival a few days later he greeted her with: “Well, Margaret, I’ve been ‘snow bound.’”

“Yes,” she answered him. “I don’t know but you’ll have to write another ‘Snow Bound.’”

Thought carried him to that loved room where there looked down upon him from the walls the pictured faces of his mother and his sister with, to his imagination, somewhat of the gaze of the far-away reality. He answered her with a sadness in his tone that she never forgot. “There’d be only thee and Charlie and the cat to write about,” he said.

His dear ones were ever the undercurrent of his thoughts. In 1881 he wrote from Amesbury, “I am here to be at the election on the sixth. I like to visit Amesbury.... I think sadly of the loss of so many dear friends.”

“And yet, dear heart, remembering thee,”

he wrote of Elizabeth in “Snow Bound.” That memory, beautiful, Heavenly, never faded with the years. In his submission to God’s will, and in his faith, the grief of time grew into the hope of eternity; but the thought was always there. In 1887 he said in a letter to the writer who also had lived in Amesbury: “I often think of the old days when thy father was alive and sister Lizzie and we were all together.” Two years later--only three years before his own death, he wrote again, “I have not forgotten the old days in Amesbury.” To those who had known these he was glad to speak of them.

The Mrs. C---- across the way from his home, whose long years of friendship with the Whittier family have been spoken of, told the writer how after the death of his mother and sister, Whittier’s first act on coming home from an absence was to go into the room in which hung the portraits of these two, and to stand before them, not only as if greeting them on his home coming, but as if also receiving their welcome to a house in which to him their presence always lingered and made it home as was no other place on earth.

From the day of his sister’s death through all the greater ease of life which came from his success and his fame, and--far dearer to him than either--the honor and love which flowed in to him from all sides, he yet never failed to feel this loss of home.

* * * * *

So strong was this sense of loss that there was a time, a few years after the passing of Elizabeth, when it seemed as if such memories would prove too much for him.

In the winter of his early sixties he was stricken with an illness in which his life hung in the balance. It was no acute disease, but the vital force in him seemed to have run so low and his recuperative power to be so little, that for weeks the doctor, who watched over him with increasing concern, was very anxious as to the outcome.

For it was not medicine or even regimen which was especially needed. It was most of all lovingness, tenderness, home care that Whittier required. At that time a touch of home meant life itself to the home-loving poet who was actually dying of the loneliness of his hearthstone. That winter his niece, his housekeeper when at home with him, was at the South teaching the freedmen.

At this crisis his nephew’s wife came from her home in New York and was with him for months. A trained nurse could not have been more watchful or more judicious, and no daughter could have been more kind and tender in her ministrations. The doctor took heart. This brooding over the poet, this constant, tactful interest in him, this cheerful face and graceful carriage always in his home--of his own family by marriage if not by birth--was, as the doctor had foreseen, the one necessity without which no other help could have availed, but with which all skill could readily co-operate. Whittier himself never undervalued his niece’s ministrations, but always said that under Heaven he owed his life largely to her care.

So, the poet came back from the edge of the Dark Valley where his feet had been treading. He long outlived the physician who had watched over him with such solicitude.

XVII

In the May of 1868 Whittier wrote to his sister’s friend and his own:

“Many thanks for thy very interesting letter from Vineland. I wished I was there when I read it. It has been dismally cold here most of the time since thee left. Nothing has been done in the gardens. The snow, however, is all gone now and there have been a few days of spring weather. The grass is springing up, the arbutus is almost in bloom, and the maple at our door is in full blossom. I have been a week in Boston and vicinity and got home last night. I was at Mrs. Pitman’s and one or two other places, but generally kept quiet. Yesterday at three o’clock when I left Boston, the thermometer was near summer heat; before I got home the air was full of rain and sleet; and it was winter. I feel the effects of the change a good deal this morning.

“There is nothing new here.” Then follow a few items of news of Amesbury. “When shall thee return?” he adds. “We miss thee a great deal. A---- left us a week ago. Lizzie sends love. She had a great time at Richmond.” [The niece who had been at the South teaching the freedmen.]

Again in May, six years later, he writes from Amesbury: “I have been a good deal unwell this spring, and had to keep house for two or three weeks. I hope I am getting better.... Yesterday the ministers and laymen came here in great force. The orthodox houses were filled with hungry guests, and as the day was beautiful, they had a good time.... Mrs. S---- from N---- and Gail Hamilton and Lucy Larcom were at our house.... Mr. Pickard has been here and staid two days. This is the second time he has been here since thee left.... We had a great thunderstorm on the last seventh day night. Spring has come in earnest now. The grass is green on the hills, the elms are putting out their leaves, and the maples are in blossom.”

* * * * *

In another letter he says that he should have written before but for his many visitors and the “overwhelming mass of letters” that had been pouring down upon him; and also but for illness--“a hard attack of neuralgia,” he writes, “which has now nearly passed off, and a weary time of sleeplessness remains. I want to go to Amesbury, but cannot until I feel stronger and better. The extreme cold of the past month has been very trying.... My dear old friend, Mrs. Pitman, has been very sick, but is now improving. Mrs. Fields has had a severe attack of pneumonia, but is now thought out of danger. Things, I believe, remain about the same at Amesbury. I was saddened by the death of Mr. B----. I shall miss him much. The C---- boys are still with Mrs. B----; but a place must be found for them soon and I hardly know what to do about it. I hope to get to Amesbury by the middle of the month.”

This letter was from Oak Knoll in the February of 1888.

* * * * *

In Whittier’s note to his poem, “Voyage of the Jettie,” written at Wayside Inn at West Ossipee, he says that to readers who know the place it will recall pleasant seasons by the Bearcamp and Chocorua. And he adds that to himself the verses have a special interest “from the fact that they were written, or improvised, under the eye and for the amusement of a beloved invalid friend whose last earthly summers faded from the mountain ranges of Ossipee and Sandwich.”

This “beloved invalid friend” was the father of the “C---- boys” mentioned in the above letter--one of those Amesbury “boys and girls” in whom the poet showed an unfailing interest. This gifted young man was an early victim of tuberculosis. For years in his failing health he was watched over with solicitude by the poet, whose letters make frequent mention of him. On the invalid’s death Whittier wrote, “I miss him sadly.”

The poet’s care for the orphan boys was characteristic of his fidelity.

* * * * *

“There is nothing especially new in Amesbury,” he says in a letter to the writer, “except the one hundredth anniversary of the old Rocky Hill meeting house for which Mrs. Spofford wrote an admirable poem. The C----’s are at Lion’s Mouth. Dr. M---- D---- is in attendance on her mother who is failing with consumption. I met A---- and M---- A---- in Portland. I had not seen them for a long time before. I found Lizzie (Mrs. Pickard) on the whole better than I had seen her for years. M---- B---- is seriously ill with spinal trouble and I fear with no prospect of recovery. The beautiful June weather is very welcome after the long and bitter winter and spring. I enjoy it, but am hardly able to get about much.”

* * * * *

He writes from Oak Knoll:

“I have been here for three or four weeks, much of the time ill with cold and rheumatism. I have been close indoors most of the time, though I went one day to Boston to see my brother who was troubled with his old enemy, inflammatory rheumatism.... I shall hope to see you when I return to Amesbury sometime this month. Have you seen the Cartlands yet?... Tell thy mother I will send her by the Cartlands who are reading it, the ‘Life of Dr. Norman McLeod’ which I know she will like. It is one of the pleasantest books I have read for years.”

* * * * *

A letter to M-- C-- in the May of 1889 records the loss of other friends:

“I have been in Amesbury for a week or ten days,” he says. “The great Methodist Conference met here last week with one hundred and fifty ministers and a bishop. Of course, I had callers all the week. I suppose thee have seen in the papers that my sister’s and my old friend, Mrs. Harriet W. Sewall, was killed on the railroad crossing at Wellesley.” And he adds: “Yesterday I had the sad news of the death of my old friend of sixty years, President Barnard of Columbia College. So they all drop away! The spring weather with its sudden changes is rather hard for me and I am not feeling quite as strong as usual. I think the neighbors here are pretty well.... I hope thee will be home by the time of our quarterly meeting which takes place on the fourth Thursday of this month.”

* * * * *

After the celebration of his seventieth birthday:

“I am very glad thy golden silence has become silvern,” he says in a letter to this old friend. “I was just on the point of writing thee.... What a queer fuss has been made because I have grown old and got the rheumatism! I trust it is about over here, but I am now getting letters from England. I have had hundreds and many of them I was obliged to answer. It is all so strange and unexpected. Of course I am very grateful for the words of kindness which have reached me. I only wish I deserved them better. If thee see M---- G---- again, give her my love, and to Dr. Furness also, he is a nobleman.... I have just returned from Amesbury and shall go to Boston next week. I have had a rather hard time with headache and other aches but feel better now. The weather has been below zero yesterday, but today is springlike again--the winter wears away very comfortably even here, and it will soon be spring by the almanac; but I suppose winter will linger in its lap until May.”

“I had more than one thousand letters on my birthday!” he wrote to another friend, “and callers without number. I have not been able to answer a quarter part of my letters. I begin to dread to touch a pen.”

XVIII

“Hail to the coming singers! Hail to the brave light-bringers! Forward I reach and share All that they sing and dare.”

Whittier delighted in the achievements of others. It was no idle word of his:

“Thy neighbor’s wrong is thy present hell, His bliss thy Heaven.”

To crowd out anyone from any good whatever to make room for himself would have been impossible to Whittier. He had no rivals; to him all who strove to help in the world were coadjutors. Yet, as he said one day in speaking of his own work and of literary work in general, “In order to succeed one must have ambition.”

His judgment of his fellow-poets and writers was without a shadow of that perhaps unconscious detraction which would have warped some natures in seeing these others so plentifully reaping the harvest of their toils, while his own garners were at that time comparatively empty; for, as the world knows, it was only later in life that these were filled to overflowing. But he was always so much in love with what was high and true that he had a share in the joy of its reward with whomever this was found. It is easy to appreciate the energy with which he said, “Emerson is the one American who will live a thousand years.”

In commenting upon a severe criticism upon Mrs. Stowe, touching her lack of oversight and discipline in her own household and its results, occasionally disastrous, he indulged in a little quiet amusement at scenes reported, and then remarked earnestly that a great many persons could keep house, but how few could give the world what Mrs. Stowe had given and was still giving it. Under all circumstances, her mission was to keep on writing.

* * * * *

“Does thee see pictures when thee is writing?” he questioned a young author. And he listened with attention to her answer that she always saw them, often vividly, and that the persons in her stories moved and spoke and acted before her as if she were looking upon real people. It was so with himself, he returned; he saw the places and persons and the scenes he wrote about enacted before him. He said that he always had to think with a pen in his hand. He said also that it made him ill to write.

* * * * *

“So, victory has perched upon thy banners and thee have stormed and taken the Patent Office! I am heartily glad of it,” wrote the poet to one of his young friends concerning an invention just patented. But he made no reference to the fact that a word from himself had helped to bring to an end some tedious delays in the path of that victory.

* * * * *

He once told an amusing story of the result of one of his recommendations. A young man of his acquaintance was in negotiation for a school in the wilds of New Jersey, and asked the poet for a reference. This the applicant readily obtained, and confidently handed to the school committee who were interviewing him. “The members passed the letter along from one to another and looked wise,” said Whittier, adding with his inimitable silent laughter, “Not a man of them could read. But the letter answered the purpose; W---- got his school!”

* * * * *

One evening as he sat talking in the garden room, gazing into his open fire, it furnished him an apt illustration of the uselessness of giving people advice contrary to the trend of their own inclinations. He asserted that one’s own experience is of no use as a warning to others. He declared that should one try to warn another against the danger of being burned, the other would question:

“You said you put your hand into the fire?”

“Yes,” the adviser would respond.

“And you got it burned?”

“Yes, I did,” the first would answer, still more decidedly.

“Very well,” the adventurer would retort. “Now I want to put my hand in and see how it feels.”

* * * * *

Through all the changing years Whittier was the same dear lover of a jest. In his age he one day handed his photograph to the writer with the comment: “There’s the old rascal!”

In the July of 1887 in a letter from Centre Harbor to the writer, whom he had known from her childhood, he wrote:

“It is too bad that you [her mother and herself] are in Amesbury and I in Centre Harbor. It is like the case of John Gilpin whose wife dined in Eglinton and he in Ware. I came up here quite ill, but I think I am feeling somewhat better, though I have not found the Fountain of Youth in these rocky hills, and probably should not if I went to Florida, like Ponce de Leon.”

* * * * *

While he was one day walking in Boston with a gentleman, he met two of his young friends. He not only stopped to speak to them, as of course, but with care he introduced his companion to them. In the roar of the traffic, however, the name of this stranger was lost to them. But concluding from his associate and his own appearance that he was a person of distinction, they scrutinized him as closely as courtesy permitted.

And they were right. For, later, at their home, the poet said of his companion in the city, “That was Canon Kingsley.” He knew the pleasure it would be to them to learn that they had exchanged even a word with the great English author; and he had not allowed the noise of the street and his own dislike of talking in it to stand in the way.

* * * * *

The poet dubbed as “specimen bricks” those innumerable manuscripts which from all parts were sent to him for commendation and criticism--some even to be placed. With his spirit of helpfulness he was much distressed by these, both because they were often “impossible,” and also because in any case, he had not time or strength to attend to them.

But where a special claim held him, it was wonderful with what persistency of kind effort he would follow the career of some writer in whose ability he believed.

His sympathy, once aroused, never failed. To a person whose literary struggle he had watched with untiring interest, frequently praising work accomplished, he sent the following message of encouragement.

A mutual friend had come to see him. Having ushered her into the garden room, he sat down with her and soon began to question her concerning this writer’s financial success. Finally, he said to the friend:

“Thee tell F---- that I never made any money until I wrote ‘Snow Bound.’”

XIX

Nearly a score of years before the Civil War a dozen men and women at the invitation of that hospitable pair, Mr. and Mrs. Ashby of Newburyport, abolitionists, friends of William Lloyd Garrison, Whittier, and other abolitionists, drove one day in June to a beautiful spot on the Newbury shore of the Merrimac River.

There, among the laurels in bloom, they inaugurated an outing which from that time for twenty-one years became annual. All the early members of this small party were abolitionists, despised and in a sense ostracized. They sought a day’s recreation by woods and water where earth and sky welcomed them. There, forgetful of hardships past and to come, they gathered at will the mountain laurel, the blooming of which they had assembled to celebrate. Little did they imagine how soon the laurels of a noble fame were to crown their labors for the slave.

With the years, however, the original dozen of the first “Laurel Party” expanded into hundreds of guests, and the once unnoted recreation of the politically despised few became a social function to which invitation was eagerly sought. Whittier’s presence and his poem, when he wrote for the occasion, were no small part of the day’s enjoyment.

Among these poems were “Our River,” “The Laurels,” and “Revisited.”

* * * * *

It was in 1865, at one of these later crowded Laurel parties, that the poet gave evidence of how--even in small things--he held his faith higher than men’s criticisms of his acts.