Part 7

Judging by his reading, the world of books was indeed his world. Books alone were never his world, however; he chose “living guests who love the day;” and he had them. For from East and West men and women of thought and power and accomplishment came to him who could not go to them. And not even personal presence or telegraph or telephone did he require to draw about himself a network of communication with the best and most interesting of the world’s thinkers and workers. In all parts beyond his sight, he knew them by letter and message. Through travelers and books the world of his picturing was not far from the real world. But especially did he perceive it through that imagination which saw

“The marble palaces of Ind Rise round him in the snow and wind.”

One day there came to visit him at Oak Knoll a widely traveled man. Whittier talked with him concerning the many nations and races his guest had seen; for his last experiences had been among the Asiatics. The poet with deepest interest questioned him of the aim and character in its broadest lines of those he had known. As the two talked, one broadened by travel and personal intercourse with many peoples, the other by power of intellect and especially by love of God and of men, differences of race and creed and nationality fell away from the eyes of both, like the calyx from the opening flower. They saw that in the hearts of all men bloomed deathless humanity, making the men of the East at one in all essentials with men in Massachusetts, or anywhere else--that invincible humanity oversweeping all minor differences.

As Whittier relating the conversation to the writer, repeated this testimony, he gave it great weight, as another evidence of the oneness of all human beings, and of that brotherhood which one day is to be realized by us.

* * * * *

He was deeply interested in the poem which he sent Dr. Bowditch, that Eastern poem of Edwin Arnold’s, beginning,

“He who died at Azan sends This to comfort all his friends,”

to comfort them with the voice of one who having passed beyond this life, finds himself still dwelling in life--not in death.

* * * * *

“When I come to Amesbury,” said Whittier in one of his letters, “I shall bring some books for the Library” [the Amesbury Public Library].

He added: “I got a mayflower over three weeks ago from Pennsylvania. I don’t suppose the Folly-Mill flowers will bloom for a month or more.” The mayflowers in “the woods of Folly-Mill,” a few miles from the poet’s home, were very abundant and beautiful.

* * * * *

In the old Amesbury burying-ground by the road leading to Merrimac--then called “West Amesbury”--slept his mother and sisters and others of his family. Here he himself was to be laid one day--as now he rests.

He loved the Amesbury house in which his dear ones had lived. Here, with also much of his earlier work, he had written “Snow-bound,” “The Tent on the Beach,” and many of his later poems. The place was filled with treasured memories and inspiration to further work. There was in it, as the writer has heard him say, a dearness and a sacredness belonging to no other spot.

Even in quitting it for a time, as he did at the marriage of his niece, Lizzie--Mrs. Pickard--he did not shut himself out from it. But for this house which was still to be home for him when from time to time he should return there, he chose tenants who, as far as possible, made it so to him--Judge Cate and his wife.

He liked to discuss politics, local and national, with Judge Cate. And all who visited him in Amesbury during these years could but be grateful to Mrs. Cate for her attention to the poet’s comfort and pleasure, a thoughtfulness exercised with tact and delicacy. In her consideration of him she might have been a daughter to the lonely saint.

Yet, one day the eyes of a guest of his grew dim as sitting at table with him, there came the keen remembrance of his loneliness. Not one of his own kith and kin was there to minister to him so loyal to them.

Whittier used to say that those born under the shadow of Powow Hill always came back to die. It is well known that this was what he wished to do--to die in the same house from which his mother and his sister had passed to the life beyond.

This wish was not fulfilled.

Yet it was not half a score of miles away, at the beautiful home of a relative and one of his own faith, that he passed from death to life. And it was here, in his own dear house, that his friends assembled to pay him the last honors. And it was from this house that he was borne to

“... that low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings.”

Whittier is a wonderful illustration of that faith which in believing possesses.

“Safe in thy immortality What change can reach the wealth I hold?”

he sang of Elizabeth. What thoughts of trust and faith and help he has given to the world! And no man can give, save from what he himself possesses.

* * * * *

Lovers of the poet owe a debt of gratitude to those of his townspeople who are members of the “Whittier Home Association.” For they have made of his beloved Amesbury home a memorial of Whittier’s life, and have gathered here valued mementos of the poet.

The Association under the guidance of its president, Mrs. Emily B. Smith, able, cultured, full of enthusiasm in her work, a social leader, has made the Whittier Home the gathering-place for whatever can best minister to spiritual power and social refinement. Men and women of distinction are glad to bring here of their work and so to bear witness to their love for the poet.

Here--one of these guests, as speaker at the Midsummer Meeting of the Association--came Calvin Coolidge, the summer before his election as Governor of Massachusetts, and bore testimony to his appreciation of Whittier as poet and man.

Here pilgrims from all parts of the country and from all lands are welcomed. From here they depart with new knowledge of the poet in his own home and greater appreciation of the man whose life of self-sacrificing service prepared him for the utterance of that last message of his--“Love to the world.”

In Amesbury also “The Elizabeth H. Whittier Club” keeps alive memory and thoughts of Whittier and of that dear sister of his, his cherished companion, and, like him, a poet.

It is fitting that this club should be also “The Woman’s Club” of Amesbury. For Elizabeth Whittier in spite of all her retiring gentleness was quick to exhibit at need that devotion to the right and that courage of her convictions which must be the guiding influence of the womanhood, the inspirer and companion of manhood in his best achievements.

XXV

Shortly before the marriage of his niece Lizzie to Mr. Pickard in the April of 1876, Whittier in a letter to Mrs. F----, expressing pleasure at hearing from her and sending her the requested autographs, announced:

“I am not going to give up my residence in Amesbury. But I expect to spend some time with my cousins at their delightful home, Oak Knoll, in Danvers. Lizzie sends love. She is busy with her preparations for a change of base.”

Soon after her marriage he said in a letter from Oak Knoll to his old friend, M---- C----:

“I have felt rather lonesome since, but am pretty sure it is all for the best.... I went to Boston to the Convention to choose delegates to Cincinnati a week ago yesterday. We elected the men I wanted. The next day I came out here, and found violets and anemones and bloodroot in bloom and the lawn green with grass. Day before yesterday I spent with the Sewalls at Melrose to meet Mrs. Pitman and Mrs. Childs. I had a delightful time. I am now suffering with a cold brought on by the bitter east wind. I long for the south-east ones. M---- P---- [a niece] is quite ill; I fear, seriously. Joseph and Gertrude Cartland are still at Amesbury, and probably thee will find them there when thee return, which I hope will be ere long.”

A letter from Whittier to the writer in the April of 1881--an extract from which Mr. Pickard published in his biography of the poet--says:

“I have just got thy pleasant letter. I am afraid I cannot answer it very well for I am under the baleful influence of our reluctant and baffling New England spring and my head is in no condition to think. I was at Amesbury nearly a month, most of the time seeing nobody and rather glad of it, as I was overdone with folks at Boston.

“I quite agree with what thee say of ‘The Little Pilgrim’ and the life beyond generally. But I like ‘The Little Pilgrim’ story better than Dante’s pictures of Heaven--an old man sitting eternally on a high chair and concentric circling saints, martyrs, and ordinary church members whirling around him in perpetual gyration and singing ‘glory!’ Ah me! It is idle to speculate on these things. All I ask for is to be free from sin and to meet the dear ones again.... I am not able to do much--even reading is often painful; but the east winds will soon blow themselves out, and I shall feel better, I trust.”

In another letter he says:

“I have just sent a poem to the ‘Atlantic’ which perhaps nobody will like. But I do and that is enough, as I wrote it to free my mind.” The poem was “Rabbi Ishmael.”

* * * * *

In 1880 in a letter from Oak Knoll to the writer, he says: “I wonder whether you are enough in the country at Au--to see the progress of spring in grass and bud and blossom. Have you birds about you? Here we have a good many. Last night a pretty rabbit came up under our windows and the gray squirrels are plenty. I have been hoping to get out to see you; but if I cannot, you must come here. Two of our folks are in California this spring.”

* * * * *

Of all the birds he speaks in his letters most of the bluebirds, those messengers of spring. In a letter in 1881, he says: “The winter has been rather hard on me and I have suffered from the inability to get out of doors much. I shall be glad to hear the bluebirds.” At another time, “The bluebirds are singing in our pines.” And again, “The bad weather has made me ill; and I shall not try Boston again until the bluebirds come.” Still again, “The weather now looks like spring. A bluebird sang today on our grounds.”

In the April of 1884 he wrote from Oak Knoll:

“I hoped to be in Boston at this time but I hardly feel strong enough to go away at present. Somehow the long, dark winter and spring have been rather hard upon me. Today I am rejoicing in the sunshine and hope it has come to stay. Unlike Lowell in his ‘Bigelow Papers,’ I don’t

‘... like our springs That kind o’ haggle with their greens and things.’

But I believe other places are no better than New England this season. Letters from Florida, Carolina, and New Jersey all complain of the cheerless weather. Lizzie [his niece] has been for some weeks at Statesville, N. C., but is probably now on her way home. A part of the time the water froze in the pitcher in spite of a fire on the hearth. Then warmer weather with awful thunder-showers and hail stones three inches in diameter and mud so deep that she could not ride out. I shall be at Amesbury most of May, probably.”

* * * * *

It is worth while to realize how frail he was, that we may realize better how wonderful was the work he accomplished. Any man might well be thankful that it had been given him to help to carry through one reform--that of helping to give freedom to the slave.

But Whittier did not stop there. He had been so faithful in one mission that, as reward, another was given to him, in a sense, along the same lines, yet on a spiritual plane. In following the footsteps of his Master, he was still a disciple of freedom. Having known sorrow, he was taught how to comfort; he spoke to souls in prison and led them forth into the clearer air and sunlight. Neither health, nor strength, nor wealth, nor happiness, as the world counts these things, did Whittier require for his work. He leaves without excuse those who shrink from a lesser mission. Yet for them he himself would be the first to find a plea.

* * * * *

In the August of 1879 he wrote: “I am half sick and must try some change. I may go to New Hampshire in a few days if I feel able.”

* * * * *

In the June of another year, in a letter from Intervale, he says:

“I came up here hoping to find strength in this region of mountains. But I cannot say that I have succeeded as yet. The Intervale House on the whole I like much better than the house at North Conway village. Mount Washington shows to best advantage here and the thick pine woods near are a comfort. There are but few people here yet; it has been too cold. The snow lies white on Washington. I expect Joseph and Gertrude Cartland this week. I do not know how long I shall remain here. Lizzie, who is still ill, is at Fryeburg only twelve miles from here.”

* * * * *

The pines mentioned in this letter from Intervale were almost adjoining the hotel there--magnificent trees, old enough for the Indians to have loved and left in their beauty. They are the entrance to woods so extensive and so dense that one day the poet, perceiving that a member of his party who had been sitting under a huge pine tree had vanished, came hurrying, breathless, up the slope to give warning not to go into the woods, as there was real danger of being lost in them.

The visit to Intervale to which he refers, and, later, that to Fryeburg, was during the summer of President Garfield’s illness. Those who saw the poet then will never forget his indignation and his sorrow over the martyred and suffering hero, nor the depth of his sympathy which rendered Whittier himself well-nigh ill.

* * * * *

After this time he wrote:

“I was foolish enough to take cold some five weeks ago and have not got over it yet. The season, so damp, so hot and cold by turns, has been a hard one for invalids, and, added to this, the depressing influence of the good President’s suffering and death. I think with thee that the death of the President is uniting the nation. God is overruling all for good.... I often think of our visits to the pines at Intervale and our ride up to Dr. Buzzell’s hill in Fryeburg.”

This drive was through a beautiful country, a portion of the way, however, winding through what must have been a magnificent forest before the fire fiend swept over the giants of the wood and left blackened stumps and great trunks of trees leafless and well-nigh branchless, pointing their blasted tops to the sky like arms uplifted to call down pity and help. But for all these ghosts of former days, the drive in the summer sunshine was a delightful experience, with summer foliage for a good part of the way, with hills at hand and the distant mountains.

The “Joseph and Gertrude” of whom the poet so often speaks in his letters were Mr. and Mrs. Cartland, both his cousins. They had spent the winter preceding his niece’s marriage with him in Amesbury. And during the latest years of his life he passed weeks and months at their home in Newburyport. They were frequently, perhaps always in later years, with him in his summerings among the hills. At one time principals of the Friends School in Providence, they were delightful in manners and conversation, their culture from books and social life mingling with their Quaker demureness, and, flashing through this, a brightness all their own. It was interesting to watch that likeness in unlikeness between Mr. Cartland and the poet, although, oddly enough, it was the former who recalled the poet, and never the poet him.

Jettie M---- for whom he wrote “The Henchman” and for whom the boat of his poem, “Voyage of the Jettie,” was named, was sometimes one of his summer companions among the hills.

XXVI

Being obliged on account of ill health to decline a visit to old friends, he wrote to them:

“I would like to see how Haverhill looks at this delightful season [October] and enjoy with old friends there the wonderful glory of the autumnal woods. But I find that I have to let a great many pleasant things drop out of my life. I thank God for such as remain, and, especially, for the love and goodwill of my friends, among whom I am glad to reckon the inmates of the F---- homestead. With love to thee and the Col. and C----, I include myself in Tiny Tim’s benediction, ‘God bless us every one!’”

* * * * *

“I went to the country for three or four weeks,” he said in 1885 in a letter to the writer, “and came back feeling better for it, but for the last three weeks have fallen back and the first hint of cold weather makes me dread the coming winter and feel that I have little assurance of another season of leaves and flowers. If I live a few weeks longer I shall be seventy-eight!”

* * * * *

It was that same year that he wrote again to his Haverhill friend in regard to the reunion of the surviving students of the Haverhill Academy in 1827-28.

“I thank thee for thy kind invitation,” he says, “but I have been so ill for the last week that I am quite unfit for going anywhere. I shall try to be at my old friend Wingate’s tomorrow, but I shall not venture to do anything more. It would give me no small pleasure to visit you, but I cannot do it. I hope there will be a very quiet meeting of the old scholars and nothing of a public nature. We don’t want to make a show of our old selves in the least. The thing is no plan of mine.”

* * * * *

A few years later he wrote to the same:

“My dear friend, Charles Wingate, has passed on peacefully and hopefully. His departure leaves me nearly alone in that old generation.”

Mr. Wingate was of the family of “The Countess” of Whittier’s beautiful poem.

“I attended the Haverhill reunion,” he writes shortly after that event, “but I have suffered for it since; the fatigue and excitement were too much for me.”

For this occasion he wrote the poem, “Reunion,” ending:

“Hail and farewell! We go our way Where shadows end, we trust, in light; The star that ushers in the night Is herald also of the day!”

Two years later, in the latter part of July, 1887, the poet wrote from Centre Harbor:

“I got away from the hotel before the fire. We are stopping here at the Sturtevant Farm near Holderness. It has been hot and damp for the last week. The fields are green as June, but too wet for comfort.”

* * * * *

Thus, in spite of being “half sick,” as he was sometimes--and sometimes wholly so, he had many happy days among the friends who gathered about him in the quiet summer resorts which he frequented as long as he had strength for the journeys. Occasionally, he went to Appledore, one of the most beautiful of the Isles of Shoals. Here the retreat of Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage kept him from the crowd. But more often he went to the hills; and this was especially true in his later years.

* * * * *

“I have been ill a good deal of the past month,” wrote the poet in the December of 1881, “and in addition I suffer from lameness in my knee. I begin to suspect I am growing old in earnest.... I have not been in Boston for nearly a year and have hardly courage to attempt it. Did any of you hear Archdeacon Farrar? He and Phillips Brooks came to see me and I was much pleased with him.”

In another letter Whittier says:

“I have been reading with a great deal of satisfaction Phillips Brooks’s ‘Sermons,’ not always agreeing with him, but liking his spirit and earnest convictions. He is a rare man.”

* * * * *

More than a year later Whittier wrote:

“I ought long ago to have written thee, but the sickness and death of my brother and my own illness have made my winter here a hard and sad one and compelled me to neglect my correspondence.... Lucy Larcom is in the city at Concord Square. I saw her last week. Do you ever come into the city? If so will you not call on me? I have not been about the city at all, but many of my old friends have called on me. What there is to see or hear I do not know. In some respects I might as well be in Amesbury as here. But I hope I am getting somewhat over my fatigue and illness, and am very thankful for it, and for the many blessings of my allotment.”

* * * * *

A letter in the March of 1883 regretting missing a friend who had called at the hotel to see him, adds:

“Why didn’t thee call here? Anybody comes here who wishes to. If thee are in town again try this place.”

“This place” was the Mt. Vernon Street home of former Governor and Mrs. Claflin, where the poet was always so cordially welcomed and so tactfully entertained that he frequently visited there. Mrs. Claflin appreciated the privilege of the presence of the “old saint,” as she rightly named the poet, in her home. Her “Personal Recollections” of Whittier give a just estimate of his character and many interesting reminiscences.

* * * * *

“I really think this pleasant day is the beginning of the end of our long winter,” wrote the poet from Oak Knoll to the writer in the February of 1887. “I for one am glad to think so. My cousins, Mrs. W----, Miss J----, and Phebe have been for some weeks in Bermuda where they only complained of too much warmth. They expect to return the latter part of this month. I have been shut in in the cold and snow, but am freer now from pain than I was at the outset of winter. The want of exercise in the open air I feel of course very much.

“I scarcely know what is going on in the literary, political, or theological world. I feel sometimes that I have a word to say that is needed, but I have not felt strong enough to write. So, the world must get on without my shoulder to the wheel, and I guess it will.... I wish I could look in upon you and see you all together as formerly. I am glad to think of you in health, which after all is the main thing.”

The poet with his usual thought of giving pleasure enclosed jasmine blossoms from Bermuda in his letter.

A portion of this letter Mr. Pickard quotes in his biography of the poet.

XXVII

“More than clouds of purple trail In the gold of setting day; More than gleams of wing or sail Beckon from the sea-mist gray.

“Glimpses of immortal youth, Gleams and glories seen and flown, Far-heard voices sweet with truth, Airs from viewless Eden blown,--

“Gentle eyes we closed below, Tender voices heard once more, Smile and call us as they go On and onward still before.”

So sings Whittier in “The Vanishers.”

Yet while most spiritual, his judgment of spiritualism in its accepted meaning is given in a letter which after the death of his mother he wrote to the dear friend of his sister and himself. She was an ardent spiritualist and, evidently, had been endeavoring to console the poet and his sister through this faith.

“Thy sympathy and tender solicitude have been fully appreciated by us,” he wrote of himself and Elizabeth. “But at this time our sorrow can find little alleviation even in the words of affection and friendship. It must wait for time and trust and Christian faith to do their offices for it.