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THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED BY 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

BY 

RICHARD BURTON 







BO§TO^ 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 



RICHARD BURTON 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

MDCCCCI 



1 



Copyright, ipoi 
By Small, Maynard & Company 

(Incorporated) 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



Ithe library ov 
congress, 

I Two Copies Received 

MAY. 2 1901 

COPYmSHT ENTRY 

CLASS^ XXc. N«. 
C«PY R 






Press of 
George H. Ellis, Boston 



The frontispiece is after a crayon portrait 
by Charles A. Barry, of which a large 
photograph, now rare, was published in 
1859. In this volume, and in u Whittier 
as a Politician" (Boston, 1901: Charles E. 
Goodspeed), the picture is now first re- 
produced in smaller form. The present 
engraving is by John Andrew & Son, 
Boston. 



t 

TO MY MOTHER 



PKEFACE. 

It has been the aim in writing this little 
book to tell straightforwardly the quiet but 
attractive story of Whittled s life. I have 
sought to give its salient events in such a 
manner that the essential characteristics of 
the man might be brought out, and his qual- 
ities as an author thereby explained. De- 
tailed criticism of his works has been 
shunned } as contrary to the plan, the scope, 
of the biography : existing contributions of 
that hind are ample and authoritative. At 
the same time such estimates of Whittier J s 
poetry have been given as shall make plain 
his development of character and explain his 
important position in American letters. In 
a biography, especially in one so sternly 
compressed within narrow limits, the object 
of interest is the man in his work : whereas 
in literary criticism it may well be the 
work, for the better understanding of which 
we scrutinise the man. 

Such has been the ideal in making this 



x PEEFACE 

volume, however far short of it I may have 
fallen. I ivill only add that there is a 
peculiar satisfaction in studying a man, 
a maker of literature, like John Greenleaf 
Whittier, because of the beautiful corre- 
spondence between his life and his ivork. 
The student comes to feel that, in the high 
words of Lanier, — 

" Sis song was only living aloud; 
Sis work, a singing with his hand." 

R. B. 

Minneapolis, October, 1900. 



CHKONOLOGY. 

1807 
December 17. John Greenleaf Whittier 
was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts. 

1815 
December 7. Elizabeth Whittier was 
born. 

1826 
June 8. Whittier' s first published poem, 
"The Exile's Departure," appeared in 
the Newburyport Free Press. 

1827 
May 1. Entered Haverhill Academy, 
where he spent two terms of six months 
each. 

1828-29 
Spent the winter in Boston, editing the 
American Manufacturer. 

1830 
Began editing the Haverhill Gazette. 
Went to Hartford to edit the New Eng- 
land Beview. 



xii CHKONOLOGY 

1831 
Published his first book, Legends of 
New England. 

1832 
Published Moll Pitcher. 

1833 
Published Justice and Expediency. 
November. Went to Philadelphia as 
delegate to National Anti-slavery So- 
ciety. 

December. One of the committee to 
draft the " Declaration of Sentiments. " 

1835 
Elected Eepresentative of Haverhill in 
State legislature. 

Stoned by a mob in Concord, New 
Hampshire. 

1836 
Again assumed editorial charge of the 
Haverhill Gazette. 

Sold the Haverhill farm, and removed to 
Amesbury. 
Published Mogg Megone. 



CHRONOLOGY xiii 

1837 
Isaac Knapp, of Boston, published first 
edition of Whittier's poems, entitled 
Poems written during the Progress of the 
Abolition Question in the United States, 
between the Tears 1830 and 1838. 

1838 
Became editor of the Pennsylvania Free- 
man of Philadelphia. 
May 17. Pennsylvania Hall, in which 
was Whittier's office, burned by a mob. 

1840 
February. Severed his connection with 
the Freeman, and returned to Amesbury. 

1843 
Published Lays of my Home, and Other 
Poems. 

1844 
Went to Lowell for six months to edit 
the Middlesex Standard. 

1845 
Published The Stranger in Lowell. 



xiv CHEOSTOLOGY 

1847 
Began writing for the Washington Na- 
tional Era. 

1849 
Published Voices of Freedom. 

1850 
Published Songs of Labour. 

1854 
Published "Maud Muller" in the Era. 

1857 
Whittier's mother died. 
Contributed poem entitled "The Gift of 
Tritemius" to the initial number of the 
Atlantic Monthly. 

Ticknor & Fields published complete 
edition of Whittier's poems, known as 
"Blue and Gold Edition. » 

1858 
Published "Telling the Bees'' in the 
Atlantic. 
Elected Overseer of Harvard College. 

1860 
Published Some Ballads y and Other 
Poems. 



CHEONOLOGY xv 

1860 {continued) 
Member of the electoral college. 
Eeceived the degree of M. A. from Har- 
vard. 

1863 
Published In War Time, and Other 
Poems. 

1864 
Elizabeth Whittier died. 

1866 
Published Snow-Bound and prose work 
in two volumes. 

Eeceived degree of LL.D. from Brown 
University. 

1867 
Published The Tent on the Beach. 

1868 
Published Among the Sills, and Other 
Poems. 

1870 
Published Miriam, and Other Poems. 

1874 
Published Mabel Martin. 



xvi CHEONOLOGY 

1876 
Eemoved to Oak Knoll, Danvers. 
Wrote the Centennial Hymn for the Ex- 
position at Philadelphia. 

1877 
December 17. Dinner, in honour of 
Whittier, given by Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co. to the contributors of the Atlantic 
Monthly. 

1881 
Published The King's Missive, and Other 
Poems. 

1886 
Published St. Gh % egortfs Guest, and Other 
Poems. 

1888 

Eiverside Edition of Whittier ? s writings 
was published. 

1892 
Published At Sundown. 
September 7. John Greenleaf Whittier 
died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Longfellow lias declared that an 
autobiography is what a biography 
ought to be. Conversely, any piece 
of biographical writing should have an 
autobiographic quality ; should be an 
impression, an interpretation, quite as 
much as a summary of facts. Facts, 
to be sure, are of use as wholesome cor- 
rectives of prejudice or whimsy ; but in 
the condensed narrative of a life there is 
danger that they may tyrannise. 

In studying a clear-cut, sane, noble 
character like "Whittier's, however, in- 
terpretation follows fact in a straight 
line of derivation. There is small ex- 
cuse for indirection or puzzling. Per- 
haps no man is a saint to his biographer. 
But, for a type like Whittier, some such 
epithet seems to hit nearer the mark 
than a subtler word. The tragic two- 
sidedness more often found in men, and 



2 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
expressed imaginatively by the case of 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, does not ap- 
pear in the Whittier mould. But this 
is not saying that Whittier was not 
every inch a man. His goodness came 
through struggle, and was the positive 
expression of a strong nature. One of 
the lessons to be drawn from the story 
of his days is that his career was 
broader than that of the recluse man of 
letters ; one in which life was reckoned 
as more than literature, with the result 
that the literature it evoked was always 
an honest outcome of the life itself. 

Ancestry, remote and immediate, plays 
a part in the formation of character in- 
creasingly important in our present-day 
biologic view ; when exaggerated, in- 
deed, pushing into pure fatalism. Cer- 
tainly, any man is largely explained in 
and by his forbears. Whittier' s were 
sturdy farmer-folk, able-bodied, strong- 
minded, God-fearing, an exceeding good 
stock to come from — none better, one is 



JOHN GBEEXLEAF WIIITTIEB 3 
inclined to say, remembering the similar 
genealogy of many notable Americans as 
well as men of other lands. It is a more 
accurate use of the phrase than is custom- 
ary to say that the poet was of a good 
family. When Whittier was born, his 
ancestors had been for more than one 
hundred and fifty years in a corner of 
Massachusetts. Their roots went down 
deep into the soil. The seventeenth- cen- 
tury Thomas Whittier, who, with several 
of his kin, came from England to Boston 
in 1638, and settled in Salisbury near 
Amesbury (afterwards to be made fa- 
mous by his descendant), was a strong 
man of his hands, a giant in stature, 
a man, too, of mental and moral 
strength : hence one of mark among his 
neighbours — as we see by sundry posi- 
tions of trust which he held. In 1647 he 
moved to Haverhill, built a log house, 
and, when well on in years, cut the 
oaken beams for the Whittier homestead 
wherein John Greenleaf Whittier, most 



4 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
distinguished of the name, was born De- 
cember 17, 1807. The poet thus had 
the advantage of passing his youth in a 
paternal dwelling murmurous with fam- 
ily traditions for more than a century, 
and of being country-bred — a good 
thing for anybody, for a man of song 
almost a birthright. 

Thomas Whittier lived through the 
troublous Indian times, and was known 
as a fearless friend of the red man. He 
was well inclined, too, towards the 
Quakers, though not himself of their 
sect. There is record to show that his 
skilful services were often called upon 
for road-laying and like necessary work. 
The poet derives through the youngest 
son, Joseph by name, whose marriage in 
1694 with Mary Peasley, Haverhill's 
leading Quaker, brings in the spiritual 
influence which was controlling in sub- 
sequent generations. 

This Joseph's son, of the same name, 
married Sarah Greenleaf in 1739, and 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 5 

their son Joseph had eleven children, 
of whom John and Moses bought the 
Haverhill farm of the other heirs, and 
devoted themselves to its cultivation. 
Of the brother John, who in 1804 mar- 
ried Abigail Hussey, the second child 
of four was John Greenleaf. Among 
the others, the most interesting to us 
is Elizabeth Whittier, a sister around 
whom gather associations hardly less 
lovely than those that make forever 
melodious William Wordsworth's dear 
housemate Dorothy. 

Whittier's most marked personal traits 
seem to have been derived from the 
maternal stock. His mother was de- 
scended from a family of distinction in 
England ; on her mother's side from the 
rather remarkable sixteenth- century par- 
son, Stephen Bacheler. It was from this 
stalwart non- conformist, who came to 
America when over seventy, planted the 
town of Hampton, New Hampshire, 
married a child-wife, and, returning to 



6 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

England at the age of ninety-two, lived 
to be well-nigh one hundred, that John 
Greenleaf Whittier got his brilliant 
brown eye ; and in character, it may be, 
some part at least of his resolute will and 
zeal for reform. One can but cherish 
more sympathetic feelings for Whittier' s 
mother than for his other parent. She 
it was who was interested especially in 
his securing an education, and lent a 
kindly ear to his fledgling literary 
efforts. Her portrait reveals a face 
uniting sweetness and strength. In 
her presence were dignity and charm. 
The intellectual sympathy between her 
and her son — close and constant for 
half a century — was remarkable. It 
recalls Goethe's relation to that sprightly 
and keen-witted mother of his. Not 
always are poets thus blessed in their 
mothers. John, the father, although 
for the place and time a man of unu- 
sual cultivation, and possessing decided 
vigour of mind, was a man of action 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 7 
rather than of speech, and first and fore- 
most a farmer, who desired his son to 
follow in his footsteps ; also a Quaker 
who looked somewhat askance at the 
boy's literary leanings. It is worth 
noting that for several generations, in 
the direct line of descent, Whittier' s an- 
cestors, like himself, were children born 
late in wedlock, his own father being 
forty-eight at the poet's birth. 

The predominance of mental and spirit- 
ual qualities in this frail-bodied son of a 
sturdy race may have a close connection 
with this biologic detail. Whittier, like 
Stevenson and Lanier, was all his life 
delicate, holding his health upon an 
uncertain tenure ; and his career was 
vitally affected by the circumstance. The 
glowing eyes in the thin, ascetic face 
bespoke the invalid who was yet sur- 
charged with an alert activity, and did 
right cheerily a man's work in the 
world. 

The Whittier homestead was situated 



8 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
in the east parish of Haverhill, " in that 
angle of Massachusetts, " as Ik Marvel 
puts it, " where the Merrimac, weary of 
its spindles, finds its way, near the old 
town of Newburyport, into the sea." 
Essex County, in the north-eastern corner 
of the State, borders on New Hamp- 
shire — part of Haverhill was once in 
the Granite State — and in scenery has 
more of its rugged contours than of the 
pastoral effects of southerly Massachu- 
setts. The town is in a bold hill country, 
set about by dome-shaped hills covered 
with a thick growth of wood. No neigh- 
bour' s house was visible from the Whit- 
tier place, which is some three miles out 
from the present city of forty thousand 
inhabitants, and just off the main 
road leading to Amesbury. The valley 
seemed shut away from the world ; yet 
so close was the ocean that its waters 
could be seen from an elevation, and in 
the imagination its note could be faintly 
heard. Near by, Great Hill, often 



JOHX GKEEXLEAF WHITTIER 9 

climbed by Whittier as boy and man, 
commands a view of many towns, with 
Monadnock and Wachusett dominant in 
the landscape. The situation of the 
home is described in the poet's own 
happy words :{" It was surrounded by 
woods in all directions save to the south- 
east, where a break in the leafy wall re- 
vealed a vista of low, green meadows, 
picturesque with wooded islands and 
jutting capes of upland. Through these 
a small brook, noisy enough as it foamed, 
rippled and laughed down its rocky falls, 
by our garden side, wound, silently and 
scarcely visible, to a still larger stream, 
known as the Country Brook. This 
brook in its turn, after doing duty at two 
or three saw and grist mills, the clack of 
which we could hear in clear days across 
the intervening woodlands, found its way 
to the great river ; and the river took it 
up, and bore it down to the great sea.") 
An ideal environment this, one instinc- 
tively exclaims, for a nature poet. 



10 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
The house itself, now familiar to the 
world in pictures and open to the liter- 
ary pilgrim, is a plain, substantial struct- 
ure, with a row of Lombardy poplars, at 
the time of Whittier's boyhood, at the 
gate, and a big barn across the road. 
In that most autobiographic of poems, 
Snow-Bound, besides the etchings of the 
inmates of the home, there are many 
still-life touches vividly reproducing 
these early external surroundings. 

The house, too, was not a bad one for 
an imaginative lad to live in, with its 
big kitchen, whose fireplace was eight 
feet between jambs — one of the good 
old-fashioned sort, as sure to have its 
crane as the well outside was to have 
its well - sweep. One can fancy the 
young Whittier reading before this 
ample hearthstone by candle-light or 
playing some homely game, perhaps, on 
the polished deal table, about which 
the family commonly gathered, or, 
again, dreaming on rainy days in the 



JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 11 
oak-ribbed, ancient attic. He listened 
with wide-eyed wonder to the romantic 
tales told him by Uncle Moses, a mem- 
ber of the household. Leading directly 
to this conjuring-place above was the 
boy's bedroom in the second story — an 
unfinished room, with the dark old 
rafters showing and the stairs a mere 
ladder, perhaps the better loved. His 
mother's tiny bedroom off the ample 
kitchen bespeaks rigid economy of 
space ; yet the house as a whole, with 
its carefully preserved quaint furniture 
and air of comfort, makes an impression 
of generous size on the visitor to-day ; 
moreover, of quiet dignity and gentility. 
It was no peasant's home. The group 
about the Haverhill hearth was a very 
different one from that limned in "The 
Cotter' s Saturday Night. ' ' And the boy 
took his share in the farm duties. His 
lack of bodily vigour made some of the 
chores rather hard, an injury received 
in stone-lifting making the case worse. 



12 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
A good deal of the work was done, we 
gather, of necessity rather than with 
relish. Whittier always believed that 
early exposure to wind and weather in 
those charming old days, when cloth- 
ing was alarmingly unhygienic, begot 
the physical unsoundness that so ham- 
pered him in later life. The farm 
work had its good side, however ; for 
the boy loved animals, and had much 
fun with the horses and cattle. Then 
he was forced to be much in the open 
air, and had the fellowship of nature's 
beauty, which was unconsciously ab- 
sorbed, to be given out in after time 
to the world in verse that best revealed 
his genius. Nor must it be understood 
that the young John kicked against 
the pricks in facing his homely tasks. 
He says himself that he "found about 
equal satisfaction in an old rural home, 
with the shifting panorama of the sea- 
sons, in reading a few books within my 
reach, and dreaming of something won- 



JOHN GREEXLEAF WHITTIER 13 
derful and good somewhere in the fut- 
ure." A young fellow of imagination 
all compact under such circumstances 
can always exclaim with Dyer, "My 
mind to me a kingdom is." 

And indoors he was devouring what- 
ever in the way of books he could lay 
his hands on, the provender being scant. 
Few books were to be found in a New 
England farm-house even of the better 
class in those days of the young century. 
Most of the volumes on John the senior's 
shelves had to do with the somewhat 
dry literature of early Quakerism. But 
the Bible was handy, and truly handled ; 
and no American poet — no modern 
poet, indeed — was better nourished on 
that great collection of writings. As 
rock-bed for future building, nothing 
could be of more value in the education 
of a man of letters. Buskin's eloquent 
testimony to his "maternal installation ' } 
in the Scriptures may be given wide 
application. 



14 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

Whittier's first schooling was got from 
an intermittent attendance at the dis- 
trict school half a mile away ; and a 
teacher there, one Joshua Coffin, of dim 
renown as antiquarian and local his- 
torian, brought him a copy of Eobert 
Burns, with the result that the homely 
little volume of the Scotch bard was a 
veritable Aladdin's lamp to the magic 
world of poesy. And the young rhym- 
ster's first efforts (he began them as a 
small boy) savoured, naturally enough, 
of that earlier people-poet. A little be- 
fore, his imagination had been fired by 
the coming to the farm of a Scotch 
"wandering "Willie, " who had recited 
some of Burns' s lyrics to the lad after 
the manner of the itinerant ballad- 
monger, dialect and all. Until he was 
nineteen the district school stood for 
all ofWhittier's formal education; but 
in any general estimate of his unfold- 
ing powers the legendary stories of his 
uncle, the allurements of river, hill, and 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 15 
meadow, of earth and sky, the readings 
from the Bible, or the occasional stand- 
ard poet who found his way into the 
house — all these must be reckoned with. 
Educational advantages fuller a hundred- 
fold are often made less of. Whittier 
was emphatically a self-made man in 
the noblest sense. His education was 
not time-limited by school or college : 
it reached through his whole long life. 
The letters of his maturity are those of 
a widely read and cultivated man — a 
little fond, in fact, of airing a classic 
allusion — as who should say, such things 
are not for the college-bred alone ! But 
to such a man the will to learn is more 
than a prescribed curriculum. His 
sheepskin is signed by the wise head- 
master, Experience. 

Whittier's natural faculty in verse- 
making stood him in good stead in the 
getting of so much academic training as 
was to fall to his lot. Poetical contribu- 
tions during 1826 to the Free Press of 



16 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTTEK 

Newburyport and the Gazette of Haver- 
hill led the respective editors, William 
Lloyd Garrison and A. W. Thayer, in 
turn to seek the young writer's father, 
and urge him to send his promising son 
to the Haverhill Academy. The elder 
Whittier yielded, though, as it appears, 
half grudgingly : scholastic culture did 
not seem altogether a proper ideal to the 
devout Quaker of that time. The stip- 
ulation was that young John should pay 
his own way, which he did by making 
slippers at twenty-five cents the pair, 
and so went blithely to the academy for 
six months, making an auspicious start ; 
for an ode of his composition was sung 
at the exercises opening the new build- 
ing. The poetising had been under way 
for years. In his early teens rhymes 
were concocted in the little bedroom 
over his mother's room, before the old 
desk, which, recovered and refurnished 
by friends, it was his pleasure to use for 
such purposes in after years. Tradition 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 17 

has it that his first attempts at versify- 
ing were made upon the beam of his 
mother's loom — a report so pleasantly 
congruous with the homeliness of the 
poet's early surroundings that one may 
at least call it well found. 

Two terms at the academy constituted 
the sum and substance of Whittier's 
higher schooling, the second term being 
broken by a turn at school-teaching in 
the winter of 1827-28. That he made 
good use of his time may be well be- 
lieved. Access to the libraries of the 
town was a valuable adjunct to the aca- 
demic experience. The riches of the 
older English literature were opened to 
him, and his own style was moulded by 
this influence for high uses to come. The 
first thought is one of regret that Whit- 
tier could not have had a longer time 
for his conventional learning years. He 
was the kind to make the most of them. 
Yet, as already hinted, in the light of 
his after career, it may be felt that, along 



18 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
with the loss inevitable to such a restric- 
tion of a liberal culture, went some com- 
pensatory gain. During this period of 
his studies he continued to turn out 
a great deal of verse. Nearly ninety 
pieces appeared in the Gazette alone 
during 1827-28, most of them signed by 
pen-names or initials. He was becoming 
accustomed to seeing himself in print. 
The u first wild careless rapture " had 
moderated since that day when, as he 
worked with his father on the home 
farm, tugging away at a stone for a 
stone wall, the postman rode by on 
horseback, and tossed him a copy of the 
Free Press of Newburyport, which con- 
tained in the poet's corner, to his dazed 
delight, "The Exile's Departure," his 
first printed poem. It had been surrep- 
titiously sent by sister Mary. Such 
raptures are not recurrent. But by 
this time his hopes fed more soaring 
ambitions. 

At this time Whittier in personal ap- 



JOHX GKEEXLEAF WHITTIEB 19 
pearance was, in the words of an inti- 
mate woman friend, "a very handsome, 
distinguished-looking young man. His 
eyes were remarkably beautiful. He 
was tall, slight, and very erect ; a bash- 
ful youth, but never awkward. " The 
likenesses of him, especially those taken 
in maturity or old age, and hence more 
familiar to the general public, accent- 
uate the austerity of his countenance. 
His face in repose — if that horrid rigour 
which is the average photographer's op- 
portunity can be so called — had this se- 
vere cast ; but all the pictures lose the 
mobile play of the features and the illu- 
minating smile and eye, which made a 
far more winning effect. It may be 
added that the pictures taken in old age 
represent him when he had lost all his 
teeth, and the expression of the mouth 
was affected thereby. From various 
testimony it may be gathered that he was 
of lively disposition, of much wit, in- 
clined to playful teasing at times, mod- 



20 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

est, keenly sensitive to the humourous 
despite his gravely decorous demeanour. 
Evidently, he was just the sort of young 
fellow to be at his best with his inti- 
mates, and likely to be misread by the 
casual observer. 

He showed thus early that interest in 
current events and local history which 
was to be so marked a characteristic of 
his whole life, planning a history of 
the town of Haverhill, for example, and 
working with his pen and by other prac- 
tical means against such evils as war and 
the rum-shop. It is necessary to realise 
at the threshold of this man's career that 
along with the idealist's singing strain in 
him went a hard-headed practicality and 
gift for affairs that hint at a farmer in- 
heritance. The school- days over, and 
the young man, his majority almost at- 
tained, in the common position of young 
men, eager for life's work, but unaware 
what they are destined to do, help came 
by way of a suggestion from Whittier's 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 21 
friend Garrison, who was now editing in 
Boston that pioneer temperance paper, 
the Philanthropist The editorship was 
offered to the Haverhill poet, as Garrison 
wished to give his time to other reform 
work. This post, after due reflection — 
the sort of solemn, pious consideration 
which the elder generation was wont 
to give important steps in life — was 
accepted. Thus began Whittier's con- 
nection with journalism, which was 
throughout his years a shaping influence. 
In this channel much of his most fruitful 
power moved and had its being. His 
work as a reformer, through the medium 
of the press, inclusive of his verse con- 
tributions of a polemic character, seemed, 
in fact, during a good share of his life- 
time his main achievement. It is only in 
the light of retrospect that his transcend- 
ent worth as a singer of songs — homely, 
legendary, and spiritual — comes to be 
appreciated to the full. 



II. 

From the time lie assumed charge in 
Boston of the political weekly, the 
American Manufacturer, published, like 
the Philanthropist, by the Colliers, Whit- 
tier's chief work was editorial for a pe- 
riod of four years, with, however, a steady 
prosecution of writing of a more literary 
nature — miscellaneous poems and prose 
sketches. Those years were very im- 
portant, both as affording him plenty of 
practice in verse-making and in giving 
vent to his interests in questions of the 
day. His paper was a Henry Clay 
organ. In it he discussed the tariff 
question, and favoured protection at a 
time when to do so was daring. Thereby 
he made political capital in Massachu- 
setts. His gift of verse was used in the 
advocacy of temperance or against war 
and slavery. The position he took on 
these vital matters already indicated the 
definite stand he was later to make as 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 23 
a reformer ; but as yet slavery had not 
become a burning issue, and the young 
editor did not jeopardise his future by 
the broadsides he delivered. The early 
verse written by Whittier, however imi- 
tative in subject or crude in quality 
when compared with the poetry of 
his prime, had a natural lyrical move- 
ment which even then marked him out 
(for the knowing) as one called to song. 
The usual criticisms passed on his art, in 
its technical limitations, should not blind 
any one to the fact that, at his worst, 
Whittier shows an inborn aptitude for 
numbers. 

After less than two years in Boston, 
he returned to Haverhill to see his 
father die. Whittier' s whole career was 
turned aside from steady progress by 
family complications as well as by his 
own ill-health. But at home he did not 
cease from journalistic connections, edit- 
ing the local Gazette and contributing as 
a free lance to various other papers, 



24 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 

especially the New England Review of 
Hartford, Connecticut, the conduct of 
which he accepted after the death 
of his father left him free. The paper, 
till then edited by George D. Pren- 
tice, was also of the Henry Clay stripe. 
Whittier's election to its editorship was 
a distinct compliment, quite as much to 
his political sagacity as to his literary 
powers. The quiet, saintly poet (as we 
now think of him) had a shrewd head on 
his shoulders for matters political. He 
was, indeed, for many years confiden- 
tially consulted by important leaders, 
and was very influential with pen and in 
person. Thus he moved towards the 
political position of which he was am- 
bitious, until his now honoured but then 
well-hated anti-slavery zeal killed for- 
ever his chances in this field. The let- 
ters and facts put in evidence in Mr. 
Pickard's Life of Whittier establish this 
beyond peradventure. 

The Hartford residence extended his 



JOHN GKEEXLEAF WHITTIEE 25 
political experience, and brought him 
into enjoyable social relation with per- 
sons of consideration — notably, Mrs. 
Sigourney, the favourite early singer of 
Connecticut. Again ill-health set a 
brief term to his work, which he contin- 
ued for some time after removal to Ha- 
verhill, but resigned entirely at the 
beginning of 1832 — reluctantly, by his 
own confession, for he had become in- 
terested in the politics of Connecticut, 
and liked Hartford, which, though lack- 
ing its subsequent literary associations, 
was a little city of bustling social life 
and some intellectual stir. It was while 
in Hartford that he prepared and pub- 
lished from the office of the Review his 
first book, Legends of New England in 
Prose and Verse. Most of the work it 
contained he wisely excluded from his 
collective editions, paying fancy prices, 
indeed, for stray volumes in after years, 
that these u unconsidered trifles " might 
be suppressed. Tet they show charac- 



26 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

teristic traits — love for native story, 
facility in narrative, a deep, underlying 
feeling for the pathos inherent in com- 
mon things, and a sure perception of 
the place of the spiritual in life. To 
this time, too, belongs the narrative 
poem, Moll Pitcher, afterwards con- 
demned by his mature judgment as 
violent and truculent. 

Whittier, while in Hartford, had en- 
tered into close affiliations with the 
Whig party in that section, and had 
crossed swords with Gideon Welles, the 
local champion of Democracy. When 
appointed a delegate from Connecticut 
to the convention of the National Bepub- 
lican party to be held in Baltimore in 
December of 1831, he had accepted the 
duty and started for the place of meet- 
ing, but because of indisposition got 
no further than Boston. This experi- 
ence is illustrative of the next thirty 
years of his life. He was forced, for the 
same reason, to keep in the background 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 27 
of State and national affairs when taste 
and ambition called him strongly in 
their direction. An element of pathos 
lies in this constant balking of his best- 
laid plans, but the consolation is obvi- 
ous. The country might have gained a 
high-souled statesman at the expense of 
a dearly loved and truly representative 
bard. It must not be understood, how- 
ever, that Whittier took to verse- writing 
as a pis-aller. His feeling for it was 
deep, even solemn. In a letter to Mrs. 
Sigourney, he says: "The truth is, I 
love poetry with a love as warm, as 
fervent, as sincere as any of the more 
gifted worshippers at the shrine of the 
Muses. I consider its gift as holy and 
above the fashion of the world.' ? 

This year of 1832 in some sense marks 
the parting of the ways for Whittier. 
He had been before the public some half 
a dozen years as a poet, and acquired 
considerable reputation. His verse had 
been widely copied and praised. Over 



28 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
one hundred poems from his pen had 
appeared. He had also gained some 
prominence as editor and political 
leader ; and he was a very young man 
— only twenty-five years of age. The 
future was bright before him. Barring 
ill-health, there was no cloud in his sky. 
The friendship of Caleb Cushing, of 
Newburyport, whom he had helped to 
a seat in Congress, was an anchor to 
windward in Whittier's coming political 
career. But now, with these fair pros- 
pects, voluntarily, deliberately, and, 
no doubt, fully aware of its effect upon 
his future, the young fellow — it was 
the harder and braver for a young man 
to take such a step — stood forth along 
with Garrison as a defender of anti- 
slavery principles. He studied the 
question carefully before the decision 
was made. It was not the way of 
Whittier's mind then or thereafter to 
go off half-cocked. Long afterwards 
Colonel Higginson characterised him as 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 29 
the "keen-eyed, cool Whittier." But, 
once his conscience was clear, the stand 
was final. For over thirty years he 
was to wear the yoke of an unpopular 
cause ; to be snubbed, cold-shouldered, 
reviled, even stoned; to be injured in 
his literary fame ; to be hurt in the 
house of his friends. But his stanch 
devotion had its reward, emphatic and 
splendid. He lived to see the cause of 
freedom triumph ; to realise that one of 
his surest claims to the high name of 
singer rested upon the flaming words he 
had spoken for the down-trodden of the 
earth. He lived to hear himself reck- 
oned, along with Garrison, Phillips, 
Sumner, and Mrs. Stowe, as one of the 
co -efficients of fate in saving a nation 
from lasting infamy. Long afterwards 
he wrote : " For twenty years I was shut 
out from the favour of booksellers and 
magazine editors ; but I was enabled by 
rigid economy to live in spite of them, 
and to see the end of the infernal insti- 



30 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
tution which proscribed me. Thank 
God for it." 

Whittier did not believe in war. He 
was in sympathy with the peaceful lean- 
ings of his sect. This attitude was not 
the result of a tame effeminacy. There 
was red blood under the prim -cut Quaker 
black, and no lack of spirit on occasion. 
He says himself that it took long years to 
discipline the Adam in him. The Puri- 
tans were good fighters in a righteous 
cause ; and there was a Bacheler strain in 
him as well as a Whittier, be it remem- 
bered. And, in accepting the slavery 
cause as his own, he put on the armour 
of battle for the God of righteousness. 
He became not only the laureate of the 
Liberty party, but a worker in the ranks, 
upon whom fell the heat and burden of 
the day. His pronunciamento was the 
pamphlet published in Haverhill at his 
own expense in 1833, when he could ill 
afford it, and entitled Justice and Expe- 
diency ; or y Slavery Considered with a View 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 31 

to its Bight ful and Effectual Remedy, Aboli- 
tion. It is a thoroughgoing, uncompro- 
mising, able, and often eloquent state- 
ment of the abolitionist's position. This 
message was a challenge to the South, 
too bold and defiant not to make power- 
ful enemies for the writer. One of its 
inevitable consequences was to bring him 
into closer relations with Garrison, who 
shortly before had started the despised 
but eventually mighty Liberator in 
Washington, where, helped by Isaac 
Knapp and a negro boy, and setting up 
type, as it were, with one hand while 
he wrote with the other, he fulminated 
for " unconditional emancipation. " 

In December of 1833 Whittier was a 
delegate to the National Anti-slavery 
Convention at Philadelphia and a signer 
of the Declaration of Sentiments. Con- 
stantly his pen was plied for newspapers 
in the interests of the cause he had 
espoused. His poems of the period were 
prevailingly on the theme. His letters, 



32 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 
public and private, to influential friends 
in office indicate an astonishing political 
sagacity directed to this one noble end. 
Using the words in an inoffensive im- 
plication, Whittier was a gifted poli- 
tician, a good lobbyist. Along with a 
lofty idealism went in him a great deal 
of practical common sense and shrewd 
capacity for affairs — an inherited trait 
from his farmer forbears. The letters 
quoted by Mr. Pickard bring this out 
in a striking way. "Whittier felt that 
so long as a party stood for great princi- 
ples, flaws in its leaders or inconsisten- 
cies in its platform might be overlooked. 
Hence, when more uncompromising men 
like Garrison and Sumner were intoler- 
ant of the existing order, he counselled 
toleration, and stuck to the party, prac- 
tising the Biblical union of serpentine 
wisdom and dovelike gentleness. Thus, 
whatever the mistakes of the successive 
parties, he was in turn a stanch Whig, 
Liberal, and Free Soiler. Unlike Gar- 



JOHN GBEENXEAF WHITTIEE 33 

rison, who wished to overthrow the 
Constitution, Whittier believed that 
slavery could be overborne by the 
agency of party politics and without the 
subversion of that great political instru- 
ment ; and his faith was to be justified, 
though the mills of the gods ground 
slow. 

That his local community and State 
appreciated his character and ability is 
demonstrated by his election in 1835 to 
the State legislature and re-election the 
following year ; but he declined to serve 
for more than one year. It is evident 
that, had it not been for his adherence to 
a positior of growing unpopularity, the 
political career so auspiciously begun 
would not have been untimely checked. 
But, in spite of the withdrawal from 
actual office, he remained for many 
years a potent force at the State House, 
a familiar figure there. 

And now the days of his persecution 
were at hand. The feeling against the 



34 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

abolitionists was daily deepening, and 
riotous proceedings were frequent in va- 
rious places. The Eev. Samuel J. May- 
attempted to give an anti-slavery lect- 
ure on a Sunday evening of August, 
1835, in Whittier's native town and for 
tlie society of which he was correspond- 
ing secretary. The meeting was broken 
up by a mob outside the walls of the 
church, which hooted, threw stones, and 
otherwise rudely disported itself to the 
general discomfiture of the ladies in 
the audience, among whom were Whit- 
tier's sister Elizabeth and his especial 
friend, Harriet Minot. They, being well- 
known to the assailants, were allowed to 
protect the speaker from personal harm 
by walking on either side of him as he 
came forth from the building. The 
poet himself was not in Haverhill at the 
time, but was undergoing similar treat- 
ment in the neighbour State of New 
Hampshire. The English abolitionist 
orator, George Thompson, was lectur- 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 35 
ing in this country, and, to escape 
the violence of a Salem mob, had lain 
hidden in Whittier's house for two 
weeks. The two started thence in com- 
pany to drive to Plymouth, New Hamp- 
shire, purposing to visit N. P. Eogers, 
a fellow abolitionist and long-time friend 
of the poet. On the way they stopped 
over night at Concord, where it was 
arranged that a meeting should be held 
on the return trip. But on the arrival 
of the twain, Whittier, who was mis- 
taken for Thompson, was set upon by 
several hundred men, who threw stones, 
mud, and rotten eggs at him, despite his 
Quaker srarb, so that he was somewhat 
lamed and his clothes were ruined, 
though luckily no serious injury was the 
result. The proposed meeting was given 
up ; and the crowd, inflamed by liquor 
and the use of fire-arms, became so un- 
ruly in the course of the night that the 
two reformers deemed it the better part 
of valour to effect an escape, which they 



36 JOHN GBEEiN T LEAF WHITTIEE 

did in the early morning by a side door, 
driving out of town by the only road 
not guarded by the enemy. Only a 
month later Whittier saw Garrison, 
with a rope round his neck, dragged 
through the streets of Boston by a mob 
which had broken up a meeting of the 
Female Anti-slavery Society ; and after- 
wards he visited his friend in prison. 
Two years later, in 1837, at an Essex 
County Anti-slavery Convention held at 
Newburyport, Massachusetts, Whittier 
again saw the meeting terminated by 
violence, the speakers, himself included, 
deafened by fish-horns and rudely en- 
treated, he being, in his own words, 
"assailed with decayed eggs, sticks, and 
light missiles, " until he departed at 
what he describes as "an undignified " 
but certainly j ustifiable i l trot. ? } A year 
or two after this, in Philadelphia, he 
witnessed another scene of unruly excite- 
ment due to the same cause. As we read 
his campaign literature from the vantage- 



JOHN GEEEXLEAF WHITTIER 37 
point of a later generation, when the 
passions heated by the moot questions 
of that day have been cooled by the 
touch of time and settled by the dis- 
position of history, if poem or prose 
screed seem partisan and intemperate 
at times, be it remembered that they 
were the outcome of experiences that 
went to the quick of Whittier's soul. 
The effect upon his writings of the 
stand he took for anti-slavery — an ef- 
fect more vividly grasped through the 
recollection of scenes like these — was 
hardly less than revolutionary. Before, 
his verse had been academic in theme 
and tone though high in sentiment, and 
with a feeling for spiritual issues ; but 
now it became definite, vital, intense. 
It is not too much to say that the cause 
of the black man gave his Pegasus wings. 
The grooming necessary to give the 
horse its final appearance — that was to 
come gradually with the years. But a 
large subject and a spontaneous impulse 



38 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 
come before and are most important of 
all. 

During his residence in Haverhill fol- 
lowing upon the return from Connecticut, 
besides the management of the farm of 
his forefathers and his political duties in 
Boston, he edited the Haverhill Gazette 
for some months, thus keeping in touch 
with journalism, and wrote much mis- 
cellaneous verse. He published, too, an 
early work, the Indian narrative poem, 
Mogg Megone, begun in Hartford, which 
has always been retained in the general 
editions of his works, though finally rel- 
egated to the appendix — where an 
author often retains early and disap- 
proved work, in self- protection against 
garbled editions. "Whatever the gen- 
eral truculency of the tone of this poem, 
the reader may remember that it con- 
tains an eloquent stanza invoking peace 
in place of war. 

A change in the home life must be 
chronicled here. In 1836 the paternal 



JOHN GKEEKLEAF WHITTIER 39 

farm, was sold for three thousand dollars ; 
and the family moved to Amesbury, some 
eight miles away, where a modest house 
was purchased. The poet was thus re- 
lieved of an arduous and not too con- 
genial care, and was enabled to give 
his time to literature and reform. On 
the more practical side, the Whittiers 
were brought nearer to the Friends 7 
meeting-house, which was located near 
by, on the same Amesbury street. It 
was this Amesbury cottage which, with 
alterations and improvements, made the 
main home of the poet for the rest of 
his days — over half a century. After 
this removal, one thinks of him, in the 
flush of manhood, writing in the little 
study overlooking the garden and ever 
known to family and friends as the Gar- 
den Eoom, the burning songs which, 
grouped later as the Voices of Freedom, 
were to do so much to hold up the hands 
of those fain to set free the slave. Of 
this period were such well-known lyrics 



40 JOHN GEEENLEAP WHITTIEE 
as "Toussaint L'Ouverture," "The 
Yankee Girl/ ' "The Hunters of Men/' 
"Song of the Free/' and "Kitner." 
They appeared in the Liberator, the New 
England Magazine, the Boston Courier, 
and his own Gazette. 

But this quiet, fruitful home life was 
soon to change. In the spring of 1837 
Whittier was called to be the editor of 
the Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadel- 
phia, a journal with a name which 
clearly indicated its intention ; and, 
after some months' consideration, he ac- 
cepted the invitation, and removed to 
the Quaker city. One of his latest ac- 
tions before the Southern journey was to 
pass several weeks in the Boston legisla- 
ture, seeking to induce its members to 
express displeasure at Van Buren's in- 
augural address, which, by its Southern 
leanings, had given sore offence to the 
abolitionists. 



III. 

Before he went to Philadelphia, 
Whittier spent several months in New 
York City as a secretary of the Ameri- 
can Anti-slavery Society, working elbow 
to elbow with other such reformers as 
James G. Birney, Theodore D. Weld, 
and Elizur "Wright in the cause they 
loved. The writing of party literature, 
the arranging for lectures, and the in- 
augurating of an underground railroad 
for fugitive slaves kept them busy. His 
health, as always, forbade long office 
hours ; but no one of the devoted circle 
was more unremitting in labour. It was 
during this New York residence that 
Whittier met Lucy Hooper, the young 
Massachusetts poet, whom he has ten- 
derly memorialised in the elegy written 
when she died, four years later, at the 
age of twenty-four, and in the pensively 
beautiful lyric revised in after years. 
It is now conceded that " Memories" 



42 JOHN GEEEKLEAF WHITTIEK 

has an autobiographic value. The ro- 
mance of his early manhood — in all 
likelihood the one lyric passage of his 
life — centred in this gifted girl. 
Whittier was a bachelor through cir- 
cumstances rather than by conviction. 
To a correspondent he declared that the 
" care of an aged mother, the duty owed 
to a sister in delicate health for many 
years, must be my excuse for living the 
lonely life which has called out thy pity. 
... I know there has something very 
sweet and beautiful been missed, but I 
have no reason to complain. I have 
learned, at least, to look into happiness 
through the eyes of others, and to thank 
God for the happy unions and holy 
firesides I have known. " Uniformly 
throughout his life, as many letters tes- 
tify, Whittier' s attitude towards mar- 
riage was half-playfully, half-tenderly 
regretful. He was no sour misogynist. 
When James T. Fields married, he 
wrote in the vein of winsome humour 



JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTTER 43 
that was one of his charms : " Bachelor 
as I am, I congratulate thee on thy 
escape from single (misery) blessedness. 
It is the very wisest thing thee ever did. 
Were I autocrat, I would see to it that 
every young man over twenty-five and 
every young woman over twenty was 
married without delay. Perhaps, on 
second thought, it might be well to keep 
one old maid and one old bachelor in 
each town, by way of warning, just as 
the Spartans did their drunken helots." 
It may easily be imagined that, had his 
environment and obligations been differ- 
ent, he would early have married. His 
admiration for woman, constant and 
warm, had in it the worshipful note 
of a Sir Galahad. The friendships he 
formed with women were many, and 
among the most delightful and influen- 
tial in his experience. "Witness the ex- 
change of letters between him and Lydia 
Maria Child, Celia Thaxter, Lucy Lar- 
com, Mrs. James T. Fields, Miss Edna 



44 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
Dean Proctor, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, 
— to name but a few that spring to 
mind. It lends a touch of pathos to 
one's thought of the Quaker bard to 
realise that Lucy Hooper was for him, 
in all probability, the ideal which ever 
after transfigured the love relation. 
The sadness of his own "It might have 
been 7 ' clings to her name like a dim 
fragrance. 

The life in Philadelphia was suf- 
ficiently stirring. Whittier lived with 
the Thayers, Quaker friends of the 
Haverhill days, and wrought quietly 
but powerfully with his pen, going little 
into social circles. Of the friends then 
made was John Dickinson, father of that 
striking personality of war days, Anna E. 
Dickinson, whose sister Susan has given 
us a description of the poet at this time 
in connection with the exciting episode 
of the sacking and burning of Pennsyl- 
vania Hall, in which was Whittier' s 
newspaper office containing his books 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 45 

and papers. The testimony is that he 
was, so far as outward seeming goes, 
calm and quiet as he hurried about, 
helping those in threat of mob violence 
or the fierce element of flame. As he 
recounted it long afterwards, he stood 
by the side of that sturdy old-time aboli- 
tionist, Daniel Neall, as he presided at a 
meeting in the hall, u while the mob 
was pressing in the doors and the glass 
of the broken windows was shattered 
over him." 

Pennsylvania Hall had just been 
erected, that there might be in the city 
a place where not only slavery, but gen- 
eral topics having to do with the rights 
of man, might be freely discussed. The 
leading champions of freedom were 
present at the dedicatory meetings, 
which finally, on the fourth day, were 
stopped by the warnings of a mob of 
fifteen thousand people, in collusion 
with the mayor of the town ; and the 
building was then fired, the papers in 



46 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

Whittier's editorial rooms, along with 
other handy material, being used as 
fuel. He worked in disguise, to save 
as much of his property as might be, 
and promptly published the paper, as 
usual, the next morning, declaring in a 
leader that the flame would be seen 
from Maine to Georgia, and that by its 
light men would recognise " more clearly 
than ever the black abominations of the 
fiend at whose instigation it was kindled.' ? 
We may smile, perhaps, at the hyper- 
bole ; but then, we were not present at 
the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in the 
year of grace 1838. And this was only 
one of several riots which occurred in 
those history-making days. 

It was after his removal to Philadel- 
phia that the first general edition of his 
poems appeared under the significant 
title Poems written during the Progress of 
the Abolition Question in the United States, 
betiveenthe Years 1830 and 1838 — long- 
winded enough to excite our wonder at 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 47 
the leisurely manner of naming books of 
that day. Besides the verse which was 
printed in his own paper, the Freeman, 
he contributed to the Democratic Review 
of Washington, although its bias was 
pro-slavery. These early poems, whether 
fugitive or in book -form, brought him 
little or no financial reward. For a 
long time it was newspaper verse, and 
so regarded by contributor and editor. 
It entirely lacked the distinction gained 
from appearing in periodicals primarily 
literary in quality. Not until compara- 
tively late in life — indeed, with the 
initiation of the Atlantic Monthly in 
1857, and still more with the publica- 
tion of Snow-Bound in 1866 — did sub- 
stantial returns for his literary work 
come to him. His early verse against 
slavery was a free-will offering to the 
cause. 

Literary work was varied by trips to 
New York City, to Western Pennsylva- 
nia, or to Amesbury in quest of health 



48 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

or as an attendant upon some anti- 
slavery meeting. Whittier' s watch, of 
politics continued to be close and anx- 
ious. Men in high office were tried 
and found wanting by the one test of 
their attitude toward the question of 
liberating the black. Yan Buren, at 
first hailed as a friend, was sorrowfully 
rejected when he wrote a temporising 
letter to North Carolina. Henry Clay, 
long loved and loyally aided, was repu- 
diated when that brilliant statesman saw 
it to be to his interest to abandon his 
earlier position in favour of the aboli- 
tionists. What Whittier deemed Web- 
ster's tergiversation called forth the un- 
forgettable lament "Ichabod." In the 
summer of 1839, when Whittier left his 
editorial post temporarily and returned 
home, he laboured zealously in his dis- 
trict to produce legislation for the aboli- 
tion of slavery in the District of Co- 
lumbia and to restrict the interstate 
slave-trade, and, when in harness again, 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 49 
agitated among the Pennsylvania poli- 
ticians to the same purpose. "When 
unable to attend anti-slavery meetings 
in person, he kept up his habit of 
writing open letters, which, read to 
sympathetic audiences, were potent to 
shape public opinion. But all this stren- 
uous activity for the sake of what lay 
so near to his heart proved too much 
for his always frail physique. A heart 
trouble was discovered by the physicians, 
and editorial work prohibited. Early in 
1840 he set his face towards Amesbury, 
accompanied by his beloved sister Eliza- 
beth. The almost constant interruption 
or limitation of his career by physical 
ailments was to be a serious handicap for 
Whittier throughout his long and trium- 
phantly fruitful life. Before he was 
forty years of age, he was told that his 
condition was precarious. Excitement 
was forbidden, and travel both in his 
own land and abroad consequently fore- 
gone — a hard restriction to one who 



50 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
naturally delighted in it. He was never 
able to attend entertainments that in- 
volved long sittings. The cardiac pains 
were oft-recurring, especially in middle 
life; and, less dangerous but more 
harassing headaches were a continual 
source of discomfort. Half an hour's 
use of the pen or eyes in reading brought 
on this head-pain. As a result of these 
afflictions, Whittier was forced to adopt 
many of the habits of the valetudinarian, 
and to absent himself from all sorts 
of social occasions where a disposition 
lively by nature and a sincere interest in 
his fellow human beings would have 
made his presence welcome. Yet, de- 
spite all this, he outlived almost all his 
contemporaries, and got through what 
was, in view of the conditions, an aston- 
ishing amount of labour as reformer and 
writer. There was an intense energy in 
him — a force of the spirit. Although 
his face was that of an invalid, this vola- 
tility of temperament spoke in the quick, 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 51 

nervous step, the impression of one 
athletically alive conveyed by the very 
sight of his back as he walked briskly 
away. 

Ten years of quiet, earnest, telling 
work — in the decade between 1840 and 
1850 — followed upon the return to the 
Amesbury home. There those dear to 
him were still gathered : Uncle Moses, 
man of imagination, whose stories had 
stirred his youth ; the maiden aunt, 
Mercy, who was to pass away before 
many years, in 1846 ; the beloved 
mother, who, unlike too many mothers, 
kept close in touch with her gifted son 
until she, too, was called ; and the sister 
Lizzie, a true house-mate, ever his confi- 
dant and faithful critic. Whittier, it 
may be repeated, was pre-eminently a 
home-keeping man. His favourite deity 
was the hearth goddess, Hestia. Bache- 
lor though he was, he knew more of 
household joys than falls to the lot of the 
majority of mankind. 



52 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
Unremittingly lie laboured for the 
slave in the mean time. He helped to 
launch the new Liberty party and to 
nominate Birney, when it was felt by 
those who espoused the welfare of the 
slave that neither of the existing na- 
tional parties was equal to the issue. 
And for literature (with his eye sternly 
on practical life) he produced many of 
his most characteristic pieces, to be pub- 
lished in such volumes as Lays of my 
Some, Voices of Freedom, and Songs of 
Labour. These struck several of the dom- 
inant notes which sounded through and 
made distinctive and dear the verse of 
this poet — the note of freedom and the 
note of home ; these, together with the 
praise of nature and the expression of 
personal faith — the song spiritual — 
running the gamut of his music. But, 
as one reads the record of his daily 
doings, his activity seems to be practical 
rather than literary, to have to do with 
affairs more than with books — which, 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 53 

indeed, is the impression created stead- 
ily by Whittier's life up to the days after 
the war. Then, the great cause won 
for which he strove, and in which, 
though a believer in peace, he had yet 
fought right valiantly and made the pen 
full as mighty as the sword, he felt 
that he might properly consider his 
career as an agitator ended, and turn 
to the calmer duties and pleasures of 
homespun song. Again and again in his 
correspondence occur remarks to indi- 
cate that he looked at his literary work 
as an aside, the central thing being his 
work as reformer. Hence it was that 
when, later in life, he was hailed as a 
representative American poet, his pleas- 
ure in the appellation was tempered by 
doubt, and a sincere disqualifier sprang 
to his lips. It seemed to him his useful- 
ness had lain in a less pretentious field 
of endeavour. There was no touch of 
mock-modesty in this. No one can read 
his letters, and fail to get a sense of it. 



54 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
"I set a higher value," he said, "on 
my name as appended to the anti-slav- 
ery declaration than on the title-page of 
any book." 

We have noted that Whittier's work 
in politics was not confined to his efforts 
of persuasion by correspondence nor to 
his burning deliverances in verse. In 
his own district in Massachusetts, for ex- 
ample, in order to prevent the election 
of the regular Whig and Democratic 
candidates, who were cold to the cause, 
he stood himself for several years in suc- 
cession as the third party candidate. 
His vote increased steadily ; and in 1843 
it looked as if, pursuant to the advice of 
Daniel Webster, the Whigs would unite 
with the Liberty people and elect Whit- 
tier ; whereupon, alarmed, he withdrew 
his name. By this time all thought of 
following a political career — once so de- 
sired — had been abandoned. The state 
of his health proscribed it. That this 
was a trial to him, we know, since 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 55 
marked natural aptitudes and tastes 
led him into that political hippodrome 
of which the too common courses are 
to be purified only by such men as he. 

It gives one a sense of how truly 
Whittier had been writing without 
thought of remuneration, to recall that 
his volume, Lays of my Some, and Other 
Poems, published in 1843, when he was 
nearer forty than thirty years old, was 
the first edition of his works to bring 
him any reward worth mentioning. As 
yet he had no realisation of the market 
value of his wares. Every now and then 
some event of the moment drew from 
him a fiery lyric, as when the Latimer 
fugitive slave case in the Massachusetts 
courts evoked " Massachusetts to Vir- 
ginia, 7 ' one of his clear-sounding cla- 
rion calls. The poem, u Texas : Voice 
of New England, " coming when the 
country was stirred to the depths over 
the question of the admission of that 
republic as a free State, is another il- 



56 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

lustration. It is not so easy to realise 
now the wide and immediate effect of 
Whittier's verse polemics at this time. 
Copied from paper to paper, they liter- 
ally swept through the land and moulded 
the thought of the people. To bring 
about such a result, something more 
than virile verse is needed ; namely, 
some large national issue by which the 
whole nation can be aroused, and array 
itself in opposing factions. The twenty 
years preceding the Civil War furnished 
a pretty steady supply of such motives. 
In our own day, at least until very re- 
cently, the prevailing issues have been 
such as to awaken less of passionate in- 
terest, and therefore to provide less stir- 
ring themes. 

The ballads and narratives in the col- 
lection referred to indicated what felici- 
tous use Whittier could make of the le- 
gendary material lying unquarried in the 
local soil he knew so well — knew with 
that deepest, tenderest knowledge of the 



JOHX GBEEXLEAF WHITTIER 57 
memory, the heart's memory of youth. 
Editorial work for papers in Lowell and 
Amesbury during this period further 
subdued his hand to the dye it worked 
in. In 1845 began the correspondence 
with Charles Suinner, which started a 
noble friendship, to be closed only with 
the latter's death. The two leaders, 
each in his way, for long years fought 
side by side. For the Free Soil party 
AVhittier did yeoman service in the way 
of satiric verse ; and a favourite reposi- 
tory for it was found in the National Era } 
which Gamaliel Bradford, after issuing 
for years a similar publication in Cincin- 
nati, started in Washington in 1847, and 
continued to bring out, undaunted by 
threats of personal indignity and actual 
attacks. This weekly, the organ of the 
American and Foreign Anti-slavery So- 
ciety, and soon to win new fame as the 
agent which first introduced Uncle Tom's 
Cabin to the American people, was for 
a dozen years the magazine in which 



58 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
Whittier's best poems were printed. He 
was, in fact, its corresponding editor 
from the first number to the death of 
Bradford in 1860. Under his kindly en- 
couragement the paper attracted some 
of the ablest writers of the day — Lucy 
Larcom, the Cary sisters, Mrs. South- 
worth, " Grace Greenwood, ?? Mrs. Stowe, 
and later Hawthorne, whose "The Great 
Stone Face" was published here. It 
was through its columns that Whittier's 
friendship with Bayard Taylor was 
begun, another of those close, mutually 
fervent relations, of which his life was so 
full. When an old man, he declared 
that fame was little to him. The world 
to him meant the people he had learned 
to love and who loved him. His whole 
story illuminates the saying. 

Of his own verse, such familiar things 
as " Barclay of Ury," "Angels of 
Buena Yista, ' > " Maud Muller, » " The 
Hill-top, " and "Ichabod" are a few 
of the many poems which first got into 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 59 
print through the Era. In the neigh- 
bourhood of ninety poems by him are 
to be found in its columns, besides edi- 
torials and prose sketches, among the 
latter the pleasing historical study en- 
titled Leaves from Margaret Smith's Jour- 
nal. Through the troublous days of the 
Free Soil nomination of Van Buren and 
the set-back upon the passage of the 
Fugitive Slave Law, Whittier worked 
with hand and heart. He refused an 
offer to travel abroad, with expenses 
paid, and remained in the thick of the 
fight, striking strenuously to the end 
that anti-slavery might be represented by 
an influential political party — though 
as yet with more discouragement than 
success. But, as the retrospective eye 
may now see, events were fast shaping 
towards the mighty struggle whose out- 
come was to be emancipation for mill- 
ions of men. 



IV. 

With the publication in 1849 of the 
first large edition of his works, Whittier 
was on a surer footing as an author. 
B. B. Mussey, the Boston publisher, 
paid him five hundred dollars and a 
percentage on the sales, and, when sev- 
eral editions of the book were called for, 
voluntarily increased the author's share 
of the profits — a story which might 
sound legendary, did we not have a 
later example to point to in the dealings 
between the publishers and the author 
of Trilby. Whittier was slowly creep- 
ing into an assured place in letters. 
He was quite aside, be it noted, from 
the Cambridge group. He did not re- 
spond to the centripetal pull of Boston. 
There was nothing fashionable about 
him or his work. Nor did he have an 
unobstructed field : the elder poets and 
thinkers were by this time in full voice. 
Hawthorne, Bryant, Emerson, Long- 



JOHX GKEEXLEAF WHITTIEE 61 

fellow, Lowell, had been heard from, 
and in most cases had won positions. 
As yet, however, the Quaker poet had 
place and popularity (in any broad 
sense) to win. 

Only a few years afterwards (in 1854) 
we find Ticknor & Fields publishing 
his prose essays under the title Literary 
Recreations, which reminds us that one 
of the warmest friendships of his life had 
been established with James T. Fields 
and with his wife, Annie Fields — a re- 
lation to be cemented and made perma- 
nent when the Atlantic Monthly, born in 
1857, should come into Mr. Fields' s 
hands. The 1849 edition of the poems 
was handsomely got up, and helped to 
give the poet authority as a writer. An 
examination of this collection brings out 
clearly the qualities of Whittier's Muse 
at this period ; and, though his best work 
was yet to be done, the judgment applies 
with little reservation to all he did. 
There are, on the one hand, fluent versi- 



62 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
fication, a natural lyric flow and fervour, 
absolute sincerity, the love of nature 
and of human nature, especially in its 
homely types and phases ; and, flooding 
it all like an atmosphere, the belief in 
man's personal dignity and right to 
freedom, and the belief in God. To 
offset these virtues, his verse was often 
diffuse ; he had a facility for rhyming 
which at times led to superfluity j his 
technique was by no means above re- 
proach ; and the didacticism represent- 
ing a conviction, which seemed at times 
to constitute the very headmark of his 
poetic personality, not seldom took the 
form of the moral tag, to the injury 
of the work. Whittier cannot be read 
to-day (particularly in his earlier writ- 
ing) without a sense of this tendency, 
which gives him an old-fashioned fla- 
vour for us. The time he lived in, the 
state of art in the United States in the 
early and middle nineteenth century, 
sufficiently explain the tendency, the 
difference. 



JOHN GKEEXLEAF WHITTIER 63 
His growing reputation as a poet who 
stood as did no other for the conscience 
of the plain people of New England did 
not in any wise keep him from strenu- 
ous effort in the more or less grimy field 
of practical politics. Not for a moment 
did he take advantage of literary popu- 
larity to step down and out from the 
fierce struggle precedent to the war. 
In fact, the very impulse to poetical 
composition came from these dynamic 
events. Whittier took a main hand in 
effecting the coalition of the Free Sort- 
ers and Democrats, which in Massachu- 
setts led to the election of Sumner to the 
Senate and started an historic career. 
The poet-reformer suffered another set- 
back to his hopes in the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise, and through 
poems like the " Burial of Barbour " 
and "Marais du Cygne," dealing with 
drastic incidents of the conflict between 
Northern and Southern emigrants in the 
Western country, played a potent part 



64 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
in saving Kansas for free labour. There 
was something epical in the very air of 
those days. Western pioneers marched 
to songs that voiced mighty principles. 
A man like Whittier could ill "be spared 
from the procession of national progress. 
His eye looked far beyond party. 
"Show me a party cutting itself loose 
from slavery," he said, "and making 
the protection of man the paramount 
object, and I am ready to go with it, 
heart and soul." He would have had 
Whig, Democrat, Free Soiler, or what 
not, all unite as Americans in the com- 
mon desire for liberty. His prose ut- 
terances were impassioned, keen, often 
sparkling with happy epithet and epi- 
grammatic turn of phrase, as when to 
the citizens of Amesbury and Salisbury 
he wrote: "It is worse than folly to 
talk of fighting slavery when we have 
not yet agreed to vote against it. Our 
business is with poll-boxes, not with car- 
tridge boxes 5 with ballots, not bullets." 



JOHN GKEEXLEAF WHITTIER 65 
Prescient, he saw that the South so far 
was stronger than the North because it 
was a unit in favour of slavery, whereas 
the other section was split up into fac- 
tions and did not unite for freedom. 

With the air thus electrically charged, 
it is no wonder that poem rapidly suc- 
ceeded poem, and that in 1856 Ticknor 
& Fields thought it well to bring out 
another volume, The Panorama, and 
Other Poems, in which some of his stan- 
dard successes are to be found, among 
them "Maud Muller," the authenticity 
of whose heroine the poet always val- 
iantly defended, treasuring in his Ames- 
bury house her picture and other memo- 
rials. Such lyrics as the " Burns, " 
"Tauler," "The Barefoot Boy," and 
"The Kansas Emigrants" further indi- 
cate the value of the volume. Ballads, 
campaign songs, homely pastorals, and 
spiritual aspirations make it up. It was 
a representative collection, in which 
already there was less of the trail of the 



66 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 
polemic. Whittier was to find his full- 
est voice and fairest flight in verse 
which, while resonant with moral emo- 
tion, should escape the partisan and 
ephemeral nature of too much of his 
earlier utterance. What the world chose 
from the mass of his writings as most 
characteristic and precious was written 
comparatively late in life — most of it 
after forty, much of it in the fifties, 
even sixties. How plainly this points 
to a poet of the heart and spirit rather 
than the passions ! In the volume of 
1856 there is a gain in art. The storm 
and stress of mid-manhood move therein, 
but tempered by the philosophic years. 

Whittier' s whole heart was in the 
election of Fremont, the Free Soil can- 
didate. It was for this campaign he 
wrote the stirring "Song for the Time." 
To the poet, Fremont was a noble war- 
rior whom Whittier had cheered beside 
a dying camp-fire, in an hour of deep 
depression, by his poem, "The Pass of 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 67 
the Sierra. ? ? He was sorely tried by that 
leader's defeat, yet rallied at once to 
write a campaign song, prophesying 
better things in the next election, sound- 
ing the bugles to battle. 

Hard upon the volume of 1856, and 
indicative of its success, followed in 
1857 the Ticknor & Fields complete 
edition of his poems — the so-called Blue 
and Gold Edition, whose format the pub- 
lishers had just given to Longfellow's 
works. Whittier had liked this edition 
of his fellow-poet, and expressed a desire 
to have his own poems brought out in 
similar style — a wish promptly carried 
out by Mr. Fields. This edition may be 
regarded as the full authentication of his 
place as poet. At the age of fifty he had 
come into his own. He was of national 
importance as a maker of literature. 
From this year, too, is to be reckoned an 
influence of importance in his subsequent 
literary life — the founding of the Atlan- 
tic Monthly in Boston. This famous 



68 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
magazine — which meant so much, for 
the general fostering of American litera- 
ture, and has so steadily displayed 
upon its bead-roll, even to the present 
day, the names of the best of our na- 
tive writers — was, as everybody knows, 
started by the late Francis H. Under- 
wood, with the material backing of the 
publishers, Phillips, Sampson & Co. It 
was the founder's ambition to give 
belles-lettres an hospitable harbour, with 
the serious under-purpose of furnishing 
an " organ of expression for the great 
moral question ? ? — slavery. To this 
end Mr. Underwood summoned the best 
writers of the day to his aid — Emer- 
son, Mrs. Stowe, Lowell, Parker, Long- 
fellow, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, and 
sent a cordial invitation to Whittier to 
contribute to the monthly. Holmes 
gave the magazine a name. Lowell was 
made its editor-in-chief. Monthly din- 
ners to the contributors were for a time 
given, not always with the intended so- 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 69 
cial hilarity, if one may judge from the 
description by Colonel Higginson of one 
of them, at which Mrs. Stowe, a stern 
water-drinker, was present, to the dis- 
comfiture of sundry authors who liked 
their glass of wine. 

The success of the Atlantic, pronounced 
and permanent, is part of the history of 
American literature. Mr. Underwood 
and his associates achieved the difficult 
feat of making reform fashionable by 
giving it a coating of aesthetics. Whit- 
tier responded cordially, pledging his 
pen. "The Gift of Tritemius" ap- 
peared in the first number of the maga- 
zine. " Skipper Ireson's Eide," u Tell- 
ing the Bees," and other poems of like 
quality were to find a place there. In 
fact, most of his finest work for the next 
ten years went into the Atlantic. This 
connection meant a great deal to him on 
4he material side, for the magazine paid 
its contributors liberally, for that day ; 
and this was a consideration with the 



70 JOHN GKEEJSTLEAF WHITTIEB 
Quaker poet, who was not released from 
the money pinch familiar to him from 
youth until the pronounced success 
of Snow-Bound in 1866. On the social 
side, too, his Atlantic experiences must 
have been pleasant, bringing him into 
touch with other writers of importance, 
although, true to his lifelong habit of 
dodging convivial meetings, he was 
somewhat chary of attendance upon the 
far-famed dinners of the Saturday Club. 
But Whittier would not have been 
human, had he not relished the sun of 
favour which was beginning to smile 
blandly on him, after such long- contin- 
ued storm. With the single exception 
of Lowell, no other author had so iden- 
tified himself with an unpopular cause 
as had he ; and in LowelFs case there 
had been no real loss of social position, 
whereas with Whittier ostracism is 
hardly too strong a word to express his 
treatment for years by those whose 
good will he would naturally crave. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 71 
It was his custom to send his poems 
and to receive proofs thereof by mail. 
The coat of Quaker cut, the brilliant 
dark eye and erect, slight figure, the 
serene gravity of the man, were seen 
but seldom in editorial quarters or Bea- 
con Street drawing-rooms. Whittier 
was reserved and shy in general com- 
pany, a tendency increased by the deaf- 
ness that afflicted him in later years. 
It must not be forgotten, on the other 
hand, that, although seeming to be 
incommunicative, he was, when at ease 
with friends, delightfully genial, a be- 
liever in the classic doctrine that it is 
wise to fool in season. His laugh was 
infectiously hearty, and with it went a 
habit of slapping his knee with his 
hand, which bespoke a soul of mirth. 

This year of the Atlantic- s initiation 
brought Whittier a sore sorrow. His 
mother died in January at the Ames- 
bury home. The blow was heavy. 
" Half the motive power of life is lost," 



72 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
he wrote to Sumner the day after. 
But he was too well poised to let the 
loss interfere with duty. In the same 
letter he discusses the political situa- 
tion ; and the next month he was send- 
ing to the Atlantic a poem now regarded 
as one of our minor classics, "Telling 
the Bees." It is worth noting that his 
literary output at this time of grief was 
large and of a very high quality. Stir- 
ring events indeed were not wanting to 
draw him out of himself to think of the 
public welfare. In the autumn of 1859 
occurred John Brown's attempt at Har- 
per's Ferry. Whittier found himself 
between the devil and the deep sea 
with regard to this famous episode. 
As a lover of liberty, he could but 
sympathise with Brown. As a Quaker, 
a man of peace, he disapproved of 
violence. Moreover, the lack of judg- 
ment displayed in the attempt to arouse 
and arm the slaves offended a man 
whose practical good sense was always 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 73 
conspicuous. His expressed opinion was 
that the rash raid "injured the cause " 
Brown "sought to serve. " In his atti- 
tude towards war, as we have seen, 
Whittier was consistent with his Quaker 
affiliations. He felt that the lever 
proper to be used by the Friends was 
moral suasion, not force. He deplored 
the bloodshed of the civil conflict, when 
it came ; but he was at pains to find its 
justification in the great principle at 
stake. He once remarked on the 
strangeness of his life in that he, a man 
of peace, should have been forced by 
circumstances into belligerency. But 
his whole life, whether in the stormy 
days that led up to the struggle or in 
the calm golden autumn that came to 
him after the settlement of the rights of 
man, was an illustration of the divine 
principle of love — love of God and 
man. God to him stood pre-eminently 
for that trait. He hated evil rather 
than men who in their blindness prac- 



74 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 

tised it. On his death-bed, one of his 
utterances often repeated was the sen- 
tence, u Love — love to all the world." 

Happenings outside his own country 
also roused his deep interest and sym- 
pathy. There was nothing parochial 
about his altruism. The European up- 
risings of 1848 had called forth some of 
his most ringing verse. Especially did 
he sympathise with the gallant struggle 
for liberty in Italy, as "From Perugia" 
testifies. A democrat in the broadest 
sense, the attempts to overthrow tyr- 
anny, to assert the inalienable rights of 
man in whatever land, were ever like 
trumpet-calls to his spirit, which, gentle 
as it was, became sternly martial at the 
summons. His poetry plainly reflects 
this feeling, many of its themes being 
inspired by foreign events. Yet again 
and again he got away from the inevi- 
table strain upon his feelings in dealing 
with such motives, and sang some tender 
reminiscence of his homely boyhood, 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 75 
like i l My Playmate, ' ' or told in flowing 
stanzas some old-time story of New Eng- 
land folk-lore or legend of the country- 
side — l ' Cobbler Keezar, ' ' perhaps, or 
"The Witch's Daughter." But his in- 
terest in politics was vital ; and he 
worked as hard as ever before in the 
Presidential cani£>aign of I860, and 
threw up his hat at the election of Lin- 
coln with the gladness of a lad out of 
school, — the kind of lad described in his 
own "Barefoot Boy." Whittier was 
at this time in frequent correspondence 
with Sumner, applauding that states- 
man' s stalwart stand for the right. They 
discussed ways and means together by 
letter or in the Garden Eoom at Ames- 
bury, whither Sumner was glad to 
come, that he might draw on the wis- 
dom of his Quaker friend and fellow- 
worker against slavery. Poems like 
"The Summons" and the sonnet to 
Seward are reflexes of this mood. Once 
in a way his indignation flames out at 



76 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 

some instance of timid time-serving : 
clergymen, those natural conservatives, 
were a thorn in the flesh to Whittier, for 
the most part, in their position towards 
slavery. Of a certain book written by 
a divine to defend the Fugitive Slave 
Law, he wrote, "It is a curiosity of 
devilish theology worth studying." 
Whittier had little use for hair-splitting 
dogma. He once said in a letter, "We 
can do without Bible or church : we 
cannot do without God." The danger 
in religion of not seeing the forest for the 
trees he always escaped, both in spirit 
and in practice. 



V. 

With war on the land, Whittier, it 
may be believed, was not less active in 
the cause. His verse was, as before, a 
kind of rallying cry to the North. 
While it is true that the poetry he 
made at this time is not, as a rule, bel- 
licose, it is also true that hardly any of 
the deliverances which appeared in the 
Atlantic, the Independent, and other 
publications during 1861-65, are with- 
out the militant spirit, showing either in 
subject and atmosphere throughout the 
poem or, if the theme were quieter, in 
lines and allusions by the way. There 
is no one lyric, to be sure, like Mrs. 
Howe's ringing "Battle Hymn of the 
Bepublic } ' ; but there are songs and bal- 
lads in good number which are the honest 
and instant outcome of the mighty in- 
ternecine struggle. It is customary to 
complain that our American poetry has 
responded but feebly to the war motive. 



78 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 

Possibly this is a tradition not quite in 
accord with the facts. Be this as it may, 
one does not feel the lack in reading the 
verse made by John Greenleaf Whittier 
during these red years. Mr. Under- 
wood, in his study of Whittier, hazards 
the opinion that no great cause ever 
evoked more eloquent and effective 
literary outcry than that of anti-slavery. 
"With his usual political perspicacity, 
the poet saw that the central issue in- 
volved in the war was the disposition 
of the slave ; that, in his own words, 
" there can be no union with slavery, 
that we must be * first pure ' before we 
can be l peaceable' men." His charac- 
teristic optimism saw ultimate peace 
smile sunlike through the battle-smoke. 
His faith in the workings of God's prov- 
idence remained firm. He was opposed 
to fighting from the first — against co- 
ercion of the South, as more than one 
private letter shows, as well as poems 
like " A Word for the Hour." 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 79 
His constant interest in down- trodden 
men of whatever clime or color brought 
him, cut off from travel as he was, 
into relations with the select of the 
earth, however scattered. His Eng- 
lish friend and fellow- Quaker, John 
Bright, may serve to point the remark. 
To him Whittier sent a sum of money 
for the relief of the English labourers 
who had suffered through the cutting 
off of the cotton supply. The poet, by 
the way, exercised his discretion as to 
his charities, and sometimes disappointed 
an Amesbury petitioner in consideration 
of a need further away, but more appeal- 
ing to his convictions — a choice not 
always understood in his town. His re- 
lations with the noble emperor of Brazil, 
Dom Pedro, whose admiration for Whit- 
tier led him to translate "The Cry of a 
Lost Soul ? ? into Portuguese, were pecu- 
liarly cordial. In after years that sov- 
ereign made a personal pilgrimage to 
the poet's home. In Mr. Pickard's 



80 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
biography there is described a scene 
than which none more dramatic was 
ever enacted in the little Amesbury 
parlonr. In 1863 Jessie Fremont, wife 
of the soldier-statesman in command of 
the department of the West, to whom 
Whittier's whole heart had gone forth 
in General Fremont's snperb stand for 
freedom, came to tell the poet of her 
husband. He had been relieved of his 
Missouri command by Lincoln because 
of his proclamation freeing escaped 
slaves within his lines. He had been 
defeated at the polls. But, the wife 
declared, the fine poem Whittier had 
addressed to him, with its memorable 
opening lines, — 

"Thy error, Fremont, simply was to act 
A brave man's part, without the states- 
man's tact," 

had uplifted him wonderfully in spirit, 
and come as a justification of his course. 
When the poet learned his guest's name, 



JOHN GKEEKLEAF WHITTIEK 81 
which Mrs. Fremont, with a sense of ar- 
tistic climax, suppressed until the end 
of her narration, he spoke no word, but 
(the words are Mrs. Fremont's) " swung 
out of the room, to return infolding in 
his helping embrace a frail little woman, 
tenderly saying to the invalid he was 
bringing from her seclusion : l Eliza- 
beth, this is Jessie Fremont — under our 
roof. Our mother would have been 
glad to see this day. 7 " One feels that 
this is an essential revelation of the 
man. It is worth hours of perfunctory 
talk about his personal habits. 

The group of poems, In War Time, 
are at once Whittier's contribution to 
the civil conflict and his spiritual auto- 
biography in relation to it. They count 
up only a baker's dozen ; but, from the 
solemn resignation that sounds in "Thy 
"Will be done" to the warm, homely, 
human note of "Barbara Frietchie," 
they are his heart history during the 
most crucial four years of our national 



82 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

existence. The time is writ large in 
them. "Whittier could not only write 
hymns, but war hymns, as his words to 
Luther ' s l i Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott ' ? 
testify — a vibrant utterance read in the 
cabinet of the President, and sung by the 
Hutchinsons on the battlefields of defeat 
or victory. 

Before the end came, and with it that 
triumph of the slave which terminated, 
as one might say, Whittier' s fighting 
years, another sore private sorrow was 
his. In 1864, after long years of suf- 
fering patiently borne, Elizabeth died, 
nearest and dearest of his close of kin, 
last of " the household hearts that were 
his own." The loss of this treasured 
sister, whose own verse was of lovely 
quality, upon whose literary advice and 
sympathy the brother had so long leaned, 
was an unspeakable affliction. Yet out 
of so rich a spiritual experience issued 
sweet song for the good of mankind. 
The exquisite lyric, "The Vanishers," 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 83 
the first poem to be composed after her 
death — "How strange it seems not to 
read it to my sister !" is his pathetic 
comment to Fields in sending it to the 
Atlantic — has a touch, a quality, that un- 
mistakably suggest the lost companion. 
It was because of his sister that Lucy 
Larcom, her dearest friend, became so 
closely associated with him in friendship 
for the remainder of their lives. His 
niece, Mrs. S. T. Pickard, bearing the 
name of his beloved Lizzie, was to min- 
ister to him in years to come. And, as 
he walked the downward slope of life, 
his friends, as Mrs. Fields has expressed 
it, " became all in all to him. They 
were his mother, his sister, and his 
br other.' ? 

But the next year he, along with thou- 
sands of anxious, weary, bereaved men 
and women of the North, was to be 
cheered by the surrender of Lee and — 
what he really cared for — the passage 
of the Constitutional amendment abolish- 



84 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
ing slavery. His "Laus Deo," whose 
refrain rang in his ears as lie sat at Fifth 
Day meeting, spoke his soul's rejoicing. 
"I am thankful for what I have lived to 
see and hear," he wrote to Fields. It 
was a personal triumph, such as is only 
vouchsafed to the few devoted reformers 
who weathered the storm. It was vic- 
tory after thirty years of buffeting and 
of baffling opposition. 

When peace was declared, he was too 
wise a lover of his country not to realise 
the importance of the reconstruction 
period, and the heavy problems which 
were the inevitable sequence of such a 
cataclysm. We find him in June, 1865, 
acting as one of the vice-presidents at 
a Faneuil Hall meeting in Boston, and 
the member of a committee to prepare 
an address to the people of the United 
States. His interest in all efforts look- 
ing to the proper recognition of the 
republicanism of the several States and 
their paramount duty to the common 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 85 
fatherland was as warm and helpful as 
ever. But, as national affairs began to 
emerge into some order from the chaos 
of war times, "Whittier's natural instinct 
for personal peace reasserted itself. He 
was glad to walk the quieter ways of 
literature. Comparing the years that 
had led up to the war with the generous 
allotment of life still to be his, it may be 
said that the dramatic part of his days 
was ended. Hereafter his stage was to 
be set for pastoral effects, his life to be 
.little more than a record of his friend- 
ships and of his successive books of 
poetry. The long fight was over. Gar- 
rison could print in the Liberator the 
words of the official proclamation of the 
Constitutional amendment, and then pub- 
lish the paper no more. Whittier's 
verse was freed from that immediate 
pressure of external events and circum- 
stances which, in the long run, is not 
a good thing for art. Over a third of 
the poems he wrote before and up to the 



86 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
end of the war were on the theme of 
slavery. Now the reformer gave way 
to the singer. It must have been with 
a deep sigh of content, a healing sense 
of duty done, that he was able to turn 
his thought to work of a very different 
sort — to a homely idyl like Snow-Bound, 
to charming narratives such as are im- 
bedded in The Tent on the Beach, to real- 
istic yet idealised tales of New England 
rural life, of which Among the Hills is 
a type. 

The five years following on the close 
of the war make up a period very im- 
portant in the survey of Whittier's liter- 
ary production — hardly equalled, in- 
deed, by any other lustrum of his life. 
That this should be true of a poet in 
the late fifties and early sixties of his 
years is remarkable, is in a way an 
indication of the nature of his song. 
Whittier's poetry is not the Byronic 
expression of Weltschmerz, nor the regis- 
tration of the storm and stress of youth. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 87 
Verse of that quality is commonly made 
before full maturity. The prime merits 
of the Quaker verse lie in the appeal to 
the homely and heartful in the life of 
the ordinary people, in his gentle, lovely 
description, and in the sweet commun- 
ion of the spirit with the God who gave 
it. For this sort of verse — old-fash- 
ioned, be it granted, but, if not the 
greatest, a very acceptable sort in this 
stressful, sin- worn world of ours — there 
is no reason why the later years of a life 
(whose strength was as the strength of 
ten, because the heart was pure) should 
not be the best years for literature. 

Snow- Bound, which was printed a year 
after the close of the war, and written 
during the summer following the down- 
fall of the Confederacy, is expressive of 
his essential qualities. The position 
usually awarded it as his master- work 
rests on solid ground. Whittier was a 
New Englander in blood and bone. 
Snow-Bound is a representative poem of 



88 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

New England, describing in a series of 
etched scenes the typical life of a coun- 
try household — in a setting of external 
nature that is deliriously recognisable 
to any son of New England. The poem 
is also intensely autobiographical. It 
commemorates the family group that 
was wont to gather before the big fire- 
place in the old kitchen of the Haver- 
hill farm-house ; and the members of 
that circle are seen through the pensive 
half-light of memory, touched with the 
glamour of the years, yet the more dis- 
tinctly drawn (there is a Dutch-like 
fidelity of drawing) because in place of 
photography the idealism of art pro- 
duces veritable portraiture. It is all 
so clearly, so lovingly visualised and 
felt. Whittier, when this winter idyl 
was completed, instinctively realised that 
it was, in the nobler meaning of the 
word, realistic — a feeling that is behind 
his remark to Fields, his publisher : 
" Don't put the poem on tinted or fancy 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 89 
paper. Let it be white as the snow it 
tells of. ? ' The homeliness of the subject- 
matter is matched by the homeliness of 
the metre in which it is written. It was 
a happy instinct that led the poet to 
throw the poem into the four-foot rhym- 
ing couplet, since Chaucer's day an hon- 
oured vehicle in English poetry for the 
purposes of plain, objective narrative. 
It is the relish of reality felt through 
a time-mist of affection which gives sa- 
vour to Snow- Bound. Its charm is that 
of a homely genre piece by a Low Coun- 
try painter. Perhaps such poetry does 
not thrill one with a passionate sense of 
beauty, but it has a household virtue. 

The success of the poem, hearty and 
instant, was a prognosis of its future 
place among his productions. Mate- 
rially, it meant more money than "Whit- 
tier had ever dreamed he would earn 
by literary labour. The first impres- 
sion of Snow-Bound netted him ten 
thousand dollars, and his surprise has 



90 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
in it a touch of pathos. It suggests the 
uncertain conditions by which one in 
the first half of the century prosecuted 
the profession of letters, that a poet of 
national standing, at well-nigh sixty, is 
still unfamiliar with the thought that 
his literary wares have a decided mar- 
ket value. "Whittier awoke to a reali- 
sation of this late in life. Henceforth 
the res angusta domi was to harass him 
no more ; but, alas ! the mother and 
sister, to the increase of whose comforts 
he would have so dearly liked to devote 
his larger means^ were beyond his care. 
Snow-Bound was a memorial of them. 
Though dedicated to the whole "house- 
hold," it is safe to say that these two 
were the patron saints of this offering 
upon the altar of home. There is the 
same pensive thought associated with 
this great material and artistic success 
of Whittier ? s that one feels in the case 
of Eobert Browning, who in late middle 
life achieved solid reputation with The 



JOHN GKEEKLEAF WHITTIEE 91 

Ring and the Book, when she of the 
1 c Portuguese Sonnets, ? ' whose praise and 
appreciation would have meant most 
of all, had passed beyond the little 
triumphs of Time. 

In The Tent on the Beach, which fol- 
lowed the next year, the poet grouped a 
number of his ballads, mostly on popu- 
lar themes of New England folk-lore and 
tradition, the pleasant bond of connec- 
tion being his friends Fields and Bayard 
Taylor. Taylor he loved and admired, 
perhaps, in part, for the very reason that 
the intrepid traveller, the accomplished 
diplomat and litterateur, possessed qual- 
ities which Whittier lacked. It was 
the attraction of opposites. There was, 
too, the natural tie of their common 
Quaker parentage. Whittier used to 
say jokingly that he did his travelling by 
proxy, in the person of his fellow-poet. 
With Fields the relation of author and 
publisher had supplied, as we have 



92 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

friendships of Whittier's life. The 
interchange of letters between Mrs. 
Fields and the poet in his final years 
shows him in some of his loveliest and 
most revelatory moods. Fields and Tay- 
lor, then, pitch their tent with Whittier 
on Salisbury beach, u where sea- winds 
blow," and, Arabian Mghts' fashion, 
they beguile the time with tales. The 
idea is a happy one ; and the picturesque 
prelude contains as good description, as 
accurate portraiture, as may be found 
in the whole range of his work. The 
colloquial connecting links, too, furnish 
an agreeable lowland atmosphere in con- 
trast with the higher air of the ballads 
themselves. It is this general agreeabil- 
ity rather than specific greatness in any 
one of the poems which characterises The 
Tent on the Beach as a whole. The poet 
did not feel altogether satisfied with it, 
declaring, indeed, that he would not 
have published the poem but for a 
premature announcement of its appear- 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 93 
ance by Fields. Whittier's criticism of 
his own work was safer than was his 
judgment when he was dealing with that 
of others ; for his natural kindliness and 
the bias of friendships led him some- 
times into over-praise — a fault, if a 
fault at all, that leans to virtue's side. 

Nobody, not even Lowell in A Fable 
for Critics, has ever surpassed Whittier's 
own delineation of himself, here to be 
found — the singer who 

"Left the Muses' haunts to turn 
The crank of an opinion-mill. " 

The poet, we repeat, was always clear- 
sighted about himself. He was perfectly 
well aware of his tendency to didacticism 
as well as of his faults of technique. 
When an old man, we hear him whim- 
sically complain that his friends who had 
been graduated from Harvard demanded 
that he, the graduate of the district 
school, should be as letter-perfect as 
they. Nor was he unsympathetic to the 



94 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

idea of "art for art's sake," as the 
phrase goes. In one of the ballads of 
this very collection he makes Taylor 
say,— 

1 1 But art no other sanction needs 
Than beauty for its own fair sake," 

going on, however, to justify, by the 
mouth of another speaker, a moral pur- 
pose in literature. Those who would 
know Whittier's attitude towards letters, 
both as craft and mission, should also 
have in mind the proem to the first 
general edition of his poems, written in 
1847, at the age of forty. In its artistic 
beauty and noble ethics it justifies his 
creed in a double sense. 

The reception of the book was another 
notification, if one were needed, of his 
steady acceptability. The edition sold 
at the rate of a thousand copies a day ; 
and again the poet, filled with a sense of 
his unworthiness, could only hold up 
astonished hands, and cry out to Fields, 



JOHN GKEEXLEAF WHITTIEE 95 
half in jest, half in earnest, "The 
swindle is awful." Along with this 
financial easement went other signs of 
his having won a large place in the pub- 
lic estimation, academic honors among 
them. As far back as 1858 he had been 
elected a member of the Harvard Board 
of Overseers. Two years later the proud 
old Cambridge college gave him the 
Master's degree, as did the Quaker 
Haverford College in the same year ; and 
in 1866 the degree of Doctor of Laws 
came from Brown. But to a man like 
Whittier congenial work done in quiet 
and communion with his friends, and 
with the beautiful aspects of nature as a 
recreation from that work, made up his 
life, and was far more than any possible 
recognition. The note of depreciation 
so often heard from him in respect of his 
writings may be taken as the index of 
an honest feeling. There is no taint in 
it of the mock-humble. It expresses the 
genuine humility of a modest and can- 



96 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 
did nature, and also his deep sense of 
the unreliability and littleness of human 
fame in the face of the august spiritual 
realities which were to Whittier, espe- 
cially in his later years, the only great 
things. His common sense, too, rebelled 
at the silly adulation which the popular 
writer is destined to receive. Neverthe- 
less, true appreciation was a joy to 
him ; and he often expressed his grati- 
tude for the love and admiration he had 
awakened. 

The pathetic background to this suc- 
cess is seen when one realises that at the 
time Whittier' s health was wretched, 
so that, in refusing an invitation to visit 
his publisher, he declares, "I am a 
bundle of nerves for Pain to experiment 
upon " — a graphic summary of a life- 
long disability. Still, comparing the 
later years with the period of mid-man- 
hood, it is comforting to reflect that 
Whittier was unquestionably less ham- 
pered on the whole by physical ills dur- 
ing his last twenty-five years. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 97 

The narrative Among the Hills, in 
which Whittier seized on a story he 
heard while spending a vacation among 
the New Hampshire lakes, and used for 
the purpose of crying up the good results 
of the union of town and country, has 
the appreciation of nature, the loving, 
closely observed descriptions of farm 
life, and the hearty spirit of democracy 
which make it characteristic. One notes 
that the prelude in blank verse (not 
found in the first draft of the poem) is 
sternly realistic, depicting the graver, 
less pleasant aspects of rural life. The 
melodious rhymed story that follows 
is then all the more enjoyable. Whit- 
tier's was too honest a nature to wink at 
facts, though his gentleness and trust 
led him to bear down prevailingly on the 
brighter side. The love-tale is well 
told ; and only the cynical will scoff at 
its wholesome teaching, made more fa- 
miliar in "Maud Muller." Certainly, 
it was not scoffed at by the contempo- 



98 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
rary public, which, on the contrary, 
welcomed the poem with eagerness. It 
headed the volume published the year 
after The Tent on the Beach; and the 
feeling of the publishers with regard to 
the demand for his verse is indicated by 
their bringing out the next year, 1869, 
a handsome illustrated edition of his 
Ballads of New England, among them 
that permanently appealing lyric, loved 
alike by Tennyson and the plain people, 
"In School- days, " whose little heroine 
so many good folk have zealously, if not 
wisely, sought to name and localise, the 
poet meanwhile holding his peace. 
Nothing is more dangerous than to use a 
poet's idealisations as genuine entries in 
his diary. Even to-day there are hints 
of school-boy courtships lingering about 
the old Haverhill homestead, but just 
enough to sweeten the air — nothing to 
set down for fact. 

By the publication of these successive 
volumes, Whittier stood forth as never 



JOHX GEEEXLEAF WHITTIEK 99 
before as New England's bard, singer of 
her humble life past and present, seer of 
her homely ways of peace and labour as 
well as of the impassioned moment when 
she arose in her might and smote her 
enemy, hip and thigh. He was to live 
for a quarter- century. He was to write 
much verse, some of it of very high 
value. But he had shown his hand, 
both as man and maker of music. The 
people knew him and loved him. The 
remaining years could but intensify that 
sentiment, and bring him cumulatively 
the rewards of his noble life-work. 

LolC. 



VI. 

Quiet and secluded as was Whittier's 
life in the Amesbury home, its not un- 
welcome monotony was often broken by 
tlie coming of dear friends to him for 
brief sojourns by the winter hearth-fire, 
invariably tended by his own hand, 
or, when the summer days returned, 
under the garden trees. His corre- 
spondence shows how much he relished 
these visitings. The playful side of the 
poet disported itself most lovingly at 
such times. Occasionally, too, until the 
feebleness of age forbade, he would run 
down to Boston, and appear in the 
Fields' s breakfast-room before the mem- 
bers of the household had left their 
sleeping- rooms. And it was his habit 
to seek recreation in other places during 
the warm months. For many years 
"Whittier spent a portion, at least, of the 
vacation time in the lake region of 
south-east New Hampshire, a country 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 101 
he knew and loved as well as he did 
his own Merrimac valley. In truth, it 
might fairly be called Whittier-land, so 
intimate and many are the associations 
with the poet. New Hampshire rivalled 
Massachusetts in his poetry. A score 
of poems commemorate these surround- 
ings. Among the Hills is one of them. 
He seemed to prefer the quiet, pastoral 
beauty of the south-lying section to 
the more rugged scenery of the "White 
Mountains proper. He liked to be near 
the sea ; for though, as a native of Haver- 
hill, he might be called inland-bred, yet 
his home was well-nigh within the sound 
of the ocean's voice. Whittier re- 
marks in a letter to Celia Thaxter that 
he could all but see and hear her in her 
island haunt on the Isles of Shoals. 
Mrs. Thaxter could see Po Hill on clear 
days from her house on the sea-girt rock. 
At the Bearcamp House in West Ossi- 
pee, at Centre Harbor, at Holderness, 
Asquam Lake, Conway, Wakefield, or 



102 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
Greenacre, many delightful days were 
spent in the company of kindred spirits. 
After the centennial year, moreover, at 
which time occurred the marriage of his 
niece Lizzie, now Mrs. Pickard, who 
had kept house for him in Amesbury 
and who removed to Portland, he passed 
a part of each twelvemonth for the rest 
of his life at the charming countryplace 
of relatives in Danvers, named Oak 
Knoll by the poet because of a clump 
of noble oaks on a mossy swell in front 
of the house. There, but an hour dis- 
tant from Amesbury, with his own writ- 
ing quarters, in luxurious seclusion, 
surrounded by comforts within and the 
appealing loveliness of nature without, 
and carefully protected from the inter- 
ruptions which come to a famous man, 
and in his case sometimes went near to 
converting the mild Quaker into a Boa- 
nerges, Whittier knew much happiness. 
But his home feeling naturally centred 
on Amesbury, his residence for nearly 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 103 
forty years, sacredly associated with his 
mother and sister. In this regard it 
came before the Haverhill homestead in 
his affection. Late in his life he had 
an opportunity to purchase the Haver- 
hill place at a low figure, but on reflec- 
tion decided not to secure it. 

Along with the giving over of the 
strenuous struggle in behalf of the slave 
had gone a release from the editorial 
grind which had long cabined and con- 
fined him from work more strictly 
literary. That Whittier appreciated 
being able in his later life to devote his 
writing powers to what may be called 
literature need not be doubted. Never- 
theless, he did not regret his journalistic 
training and experience. 

In a letter to Mr. E. L. Godkin he re- 
pudiates what the editor of the Nation 
took to be a slighting reference to news- 
paper work in The Tent on the Beach, and 
declares that he considered his editorial 
labour in the cause of liberty his main 



104 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

life-work, his work as an author being 
"simply episodical/' and the public 
favour gained thereby "a grateful sur- 
prise rather than an expected reward. " 
Whittier, in fact, stepped into literature 
by the despised back door of journalism, 
as American men of letters have been in 
the way of doing from the earliest day to 
our own. The newspaper has proved 
a foster-mother, not a step-mother, to 
literary aspirants. 

Eobert Louis Stevenson's pathetic wish 
(in the days when fortune had not yet 
smiled upon him) for three of the gifts 
of the gods to make existence glad will 
be remembered — a modest but assured 
income, health, and friends, especially 
friends. The first and last, at least, 
Whittier had in full measure for the 
rest of his days. Few men have been 
more richly blessed in friends, and this 
is in itself a sign of his power for win- 
ning and holding hearts. The unstable 
nature of health had its effect, as we 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 105 
have seen, in excluding him from much 
in the way of social pleasure. It pro- 
duced at first an impression of shyness 
in his character, which in time became, 
in some measure, a genuine characteris- 
tic. But one recompense came to him 
and his intimates in the peculiarly close 
and cordial relations between them. 
Perhaps one physically capable of steady 
mental labour might have seen less of and 
been less to others. As it is, Whittier's 
productiveness in prose and verse, of 
which a sense is borne in upon one who 
glances through the full list of his works 
to be found in Foley's American Authors, 
is doubly remarkable because of this 
handicap. A certain tenderness must 
have been felt by those entering into 
warm personal intercourse with him be- 
cause of his physical infirmities. Besides 
the organic heart trouble and the grow- 
ing deafness in one ear, another, although 
slight, physical defect may be here alluded 
to. He was colour-blind in respect of red 



106 JOHN GEEBKLBAF WHITTIEE 

and green. The red apple was not dis- 
tinguishable in hue from the green leaves 
surrounding it — a thing hard to realise 
in a writer whose verse is so picturesquely 
rich in colour values. But, after all, in 
reviewing the calm, benign, and pros- 
perous late years of Whittier, the feeling 
is that his lot was a most fortunate one. 
The ancient saying, u Call no man happy 
until he is dead," does not apply to him. 
By his own word, he enjoyed life, de- 
spite all its tragedies, bitternesses, and 
losses, to the end. 

The production of poetry during the 
years between the sixtieth and seventieth 
of his life was steady and of a high 
average quality, comparing favourably 
with what had gone before. There was 
no second Snow-Bound, it is true ; but 
narrative poems like " Miriam" and 
"The Pennsylvania Pilgrim," lyrics so 
good as "The Pageant," or a memorial 
such as the stately ode to Sumner — 
whose death he mourned as the loss of 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 107 

a dear friend and admired leader — show 
no hint of the coming of the night when 
no man can work. In these mature 
efforts, Whittier gave far more attention 
to self-criticism than of old. His verse 
bears marks of the labour of the file, 
to its advantage. The art value of his 
work is unquestionably greater. And he 
kept, to a marvellous degree into extreme 
old age the lyric gift, the capacity for 
tuneful song : he lay down with his sing- 
ing-robes wrapt about him. In all strict- 
ures on his technique, it will be well 
to bear this in mind. Tennyson alone, 
among the poets of our time and tongue, 
equalled Whittier in this respect — Ten- 
nyson, with his " Crossing the Bar," a 
precious distillation, when he had at- 
tained to fourscore years. 

The volume called Child Life: A Col- 
lection of Poems, which he compiled in 
1871, and which was followed two years 
later by its companion, Child Life in 
Prose, is of interest in its suggestion of 



108 JOHN" GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
Whittier's deep and abiding love for the 
young — evidence of which, his letters 
contain in abundance. Here was one of 
the most winsome phases of his nature. 
In his summer wanderings children fol- 
lowed him about as they did (for another 
reason) the Pied Piper. The grave, 
dignified, unbending Quaker — (a friend 
has noted his peculiar physical perpen- 
dicularity, so marked that, in picking 
up an object from the floor, he did not 
bend his back like common mortals) — 
had the child-heart which the little ones 
recognised and loved. A large and 
beautiful side of the poet's character 
comes out in his relations, not to children 
alone, but to his humble neighbours and 
— no less significant — to animal friends, 
who were always to be found as house- 
hold pets in his different homes from 
the day when he affectionately rubbed 
the nose of his father's cow in the barn 
at Haverhill. With the rank and file 
of his fellow-townsmen in Haverhill or 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 109 
Auiesbury he was on terms of easy 
friendship that held no hint of superior- 
ity or aloofness. He would "sit on a 
barrel, and discuss the affairs of the 
day," with thein, Colonel Higginson tells 
us. As a converse to this, those un- 
crowned kings, his neighbours, were free, 
after the true American fashion, to vent 
opinions of him as of any other citizen, 
and exercised their rights. There was 
some expression of grieved surprise when 
at the poet's death he was found pos- 
sessed of the substantial little fortune of 
one hundred and forty thousand dollars. 
It was a trifle like stealing a march on 
the town. Whittier, for his part, car- 
ried the democratic feeling of fellowship 
so far as to fall when in conversation 
with plain folk into the grammar-defy- 
ing colloquialisms of the locality, as 
when he astonished a labourer much in 
awe of the bard, with whom he was dis- 
coursing of apples, by declaring, "Some 
years they ain't wuth pickinV 



110 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 

Whittier's Quaker ism, always a cen- 
tral and controlling influence in his 
work as well as life, was sweetened and 
broadened as lie grew older. He was a 
faithful attendant upon the meetings of 
the Friends. His coat, of a model he 
gave a tailor in Philadelphia when he 
was in his thirties, remained Quaker- cut 
to the last. He loved the simpler 
methods of the sect, and had small sym- 
pathy with the attempts to introduce 
new-fangled modifications of the old 
ways of gravity and silence. Neither 
steeples without nor show singing within 
pleased his taste. His disbelief in war 
underlay the most perfervid of his' dia- 
tribes against slavery. In fact, this 
phase of his utterance was an expression 
of his Quaker creed, since one of its 
cardinal expressions is love of personal 
freedom — an outward manifestation to 
balance its esoteric leaning on the doc- 
trine of the Inner Light. Yet in 1875, 
when he was compiling Songs of Three 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 111 
Centuries with Lucy Larcom, lie over- 
ruled his feeliug as to warlike poems so 
far as to include Mrs. Howe's " Battle 
Hymn of the Republic." And many a 
passage in his correspondence testifies 
that in these elder years his religion 
was in no vital sense sectarian — a fact 
further and happily illustrated by the 
use of numerous hymns from his hand 
among the various denominations. The 
best of his religious verse is as catholic, 
as uncircumscribed by dogma, as one of 
Eichard Jeflferies's hill-top adorations. 
Whittier's religion, indeed, was of the 
heart rather than of the head. The 
calm beauty of holiness is the note of 
his ripe maturity. "I think every 
child should cling to the faith of its 
parents until it learns something bet- 
ter, " he declared. He did not escape 
the inevitable readjustments of religious 
views in the light of scientific revela- 
tions, culminating about 1850 in Darwin ? 
Wallace, and Spencer, and since so won- 



112 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER 
derfully expanded. His mind was too 
candid and too open, his sonl too un- 
flinchingly honest, for any other result. 
His poems of the later years are wit- 
nesses. Eead "My Soul and I" and 
"Questions of Doubt " to realise it. 
Doubt he knew, but with him trust and 
love conquered. At times the great 
mysteries weighed heavily upon his 
spirit. The attitude in some of his finest 
spiritual songs suggests that of Tennyson 
in In Memoriam — the brooding, analytic 
intellect giving way to the intuitive 
affirmations. 

The instinctive looking to Whittier as 
a national poet was exemplified by the 
request of Gilmore that he write an ode 
for the Peace Jubilee of 1873, — a request 
refused, though afterwards Whittier sent 
in anonymously the poem printed in his 
works as "A Christmas Carmen, " and 
certainly far ahead of most verse of occa- 
sion. There is some amusement in the 
reflection that Gilmore rejected the 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 113 

ode, unaware of its authorship. One re- 
grets that the musician was not a mag- 
azine editor or publisher, that one might 
indulge in satire on the familiar mis- 
takes of those maligned judges. Whit- 
tier could never depend upon himself to 
accept engagements of this kind. He 
did not possess the facility of his friend, 
Dr. Holmes, in this sort of accomplish- 
ment ; but his efforts at such times, 
when once the "yes" was said, were al- 
ways of a certain dignity, an elevation, 
and sincerity which made them satisfac- 
tory. Another example of the "occa- 
sional" was the "Centennial Hymn" for 
the national celebration of 1876, writ- 
ten at the earnest request of Bayard 
Taylor, who had composed a hymn 
himself, and afterwards withdrawn it 
because he had accepted an invita- 
tion to write an ode for the same festi- 
val. Whittier's memorial poem, "The 
Vow of Washington," for the centennial 
of the inauguration of the first President 



114 JOHN GEBENLEAF WHITTIEE 

of the republic, is still another composi- 
tion of this class ; and, although the poet 
declared himself ashamed of it, the critic 
to-day, remembering that it was pro- 
duced at eighty-two, must pronounce it 
to be a remarkable example of the re- 
tention of poetic powers. The manner 
of its reception by the people at large, 
moreover, was of a kind to remove 
doubt even from its author's mind. 

Whittier's seventieth birthday, in 
1877, was marked by commemorative 
happenings, and stands out a white 
milestone in his peaceful life journey. 
The Boston Literary World for Decem- 
ber 1 of that year published many trib- 
utes in verse and prose by representative 
American men and women of letters. 
There were letters from veterans like 
Mrs. Stowe, Bancroft, and Bryant ; 
poems from fellow-songmen — Longfel- 
low, Holmes, Taylor, and Mr. Stedman — 
to pick out a few. There followed on the 
night of his birthday, the 17th, a dinner 



JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEK 115 
at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston, given 
by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, 
then celebrating its own twentieth birth- 
day, to contributors to that magazine, 
with Mr. H. O. Houghton presiding and 
Whittier the guest of honour. The 
gathering of literary folk was note- 
worthy ; and Whittier, who had at- 
tended the unwonted (perhaps not alto- 
gether welcome) function with much 
secret misgiving — u It is bad enough to 
be old, without being twitted with it," 
he humorously complained to a member 
of his family — even felt it incumbent 
upon him to make a little speech, by 
way of introducing a poem written for 
the occasion, and thereupon read by 
Longfellow. Speech - making was a 
social exercise entirely laid aside by 
Whittier since the days of his political 
activity. Dr. Holmes read a character- 
istically felicitous piece of verse, in 
which occurred the oft-quoted epithet 
descriptive of his friend as the "wood- 



116 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

thrush of Essex." The exercises in- 
cluded a burlesque treatment of the 
three leaders — Longfellow, Holmes, and 
Whittier — by Mark Twain, whose in- 
stinct for audacious fun-making was not 
to be quelled by that august assembly. 
When the Quaker singer was introduced, 
the whole company arose and cheered. 
The anniversary was also commemorated 
in various towns, led by Amesbury and 
Danvers. From this time, as the years 
went on, the celebrations of his birthdays 
in the schools and other educational in- 
stitutions of our land became annual, as 
his fame became more and more a house- 
hold word. This recognition, demo- 
cratic, spontaneous, and general, was, 
especially in view of the partisan nature 
of his early writings, as welcome as it 
was exceptional. But Whittier pre- 
served his ingrain modesty. " Over- 
praise pains like blame, " he wrote to 
Mr. Houghton. His conscience was of 
the familiar Puritan type which did not 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 117 
allow undue self-complacency. More- 
over, he was now an old man, to whom, 
as lie said, the " eternal realities " were 
" taking the place of the shadows and 
illusions of time." It is a satisfaction to 
behold a good and gifted man reaping 
the fruits of a noble mid- day labour in 
a beautiful Indian summer of rest and 
peace. The annals of literature do not 
present too many such spectacles. It is 
one of the admirable things about our 
elder and major American writers that 
their lives and works are so frequently 
in this harmony ; and in no case, surely, 
is it truer than in Whittier's. 

There was much fine song in him 
still. Fifteen years of life and pro- 
duction were ahead of the frail New 
Englander, who in early manhood had, 
in the opinion of his Haverhill ac- 
quaintances, taken to writing as a sec- 
ond best thing, when the state of his 
health precluded business or active 
politics. Only the next year (1878) The 



118 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
Vision of Echard, and Other Poems, in- 
cluded some of the loveliest of his lyrics 
— "The Witch of Wenham," which 
made Dr. Holmes cry ; the charming de- 
scriptive piece, "Sunset on the Bear- 
camp ?? ; and the delicately chivalric 
"The Henchman," one of the very few 
love-poems ever written by Whittier, 
and suggesting that he could have won 
laurels in a field he rarely entered. 
That a bard who was rising seventy 
could turn out such verse is unusual 
enough to put a value upon it over and 
above its intrinsic merit, which is very 
genuine. 



VII. 

Whittier's old age, peaceful and 
fortunate as it was, could not escape one 
of the stern penalties of longevity — the 
loss of friends. They dropped off one 
by one — the comrades of abolition days 
or those with whom he since had come 
into close communion. Year by year 
Holmes's thought of the "last leaf upon 
the tree" could come more closely, 
keenly, home to the poet. Sumner died 
in 1872, Bayard Taylor in 1878, Long- 
fellow in 1882, and others, of less note, 
but not less warmly loved, departed in 
their turn. His correspondence became 
increasingly a burden, as it must to any 
man of wide reputation, augmented in 
his case by an old-fashioned dislike to 
dictation, which led him to reply to 
letters by his own hand, and because 
of his kindly heart, which made him 
shrink from the refusal of solicitations 
of all kinds. The autograph fiend was 



120 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 
abroad, and the literary pilgrim ever 
at his gates. But there were many 
mitigations. New friends were raised 
up for him as the older ones passed 
away : many of the latter still remained. 
Whittier's correspondence, particularly 
with the younger writers, men and 
women in whom he took a keen in- 
terest and whose work he cordially ap- 
preciated, was one of his chief pleasures. 
Helping to a realisation of this fact are 
the letters exchanged with Lucy Lar- 
com, Celia Thaxter, Miss Sarah Orne 
Jewett, Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 
Ward, Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Charlotte 
Fiske Bates, Miss Edna Dean Proctor — 
veterans and comparative beginners — 
all united in loving veneration of his 
personality. Dr. Holmes, who outlived 
him to write his epitaph, was a treas- 
ured neighbour, and would drive over 
from Beverly to Danvers now and again 
for a quiet talk. Nor did the poet drop 
his hold on affairs. In these years of re- 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTTEE 121 
tirenient his letters show how closely he 
followed public events. Now he com- 
ments on Hayes's inaugural address; 
now writes a letter to the Boston Adver- 
tiser, protesting against the movement 
to defeat the re-election of Senator 
Hoar, of Massachusetts ; now he is send- 
ing Mr. "Winslow a contribution to the 
Egyptian Exploration Fund, with a note 
revealing his sympathetic knowledge of 
that work. He watched the drift of 
politics with a scarcely abated attention, 
and with the old-time loyalty to a party 
which, whatever its mistakes, stood, he 
believed, for great principles. u I am a 
Eepublican still," he wrote at the time 
when the voice of the Mugwump was 
heard in the land. c l If my party makes 
a bad nomination, I shall not vote for 
it, but shall not stultify myself by going 
over to a party which has done its worst 
to destroy the Union and sustain slav- 
ery " — a remark having the ring of the 
militant days. 



122 JOHN GEEBNLEAF WHITTIEE 

But the things of God were most to him 
in these later years. i 6 He dwelt most in- 
tently/' writes a friend, "upon the great 
spiritual and eternal realities. " He 
loved more and more the quiet memories 
gathering about the Amesbury cottage, 
upon whose walls the portraits of mother 
and sister were silent but eloquent wit- 
nesses to the unforgotten past. None the 
less did he enjoy the frequent changes 
of residence already described — the 
roomy seclusion of Oak Knoll, the visits 
with his kin, the Cartlands, at Newbury- 
port. The circumference of the circle 
describing these travellings only grad- 
ually narrowed as feebleness grew upon 
him. 

Meanwhile he continued to write; 
and successive volumes of his verse were 
published. Between 1880 and 1892, the 
year of his death, he printed nearly 
ninety poems, in one year (1882) writ- 
ing a dozen, and eight so late as in the 
year 1890. In 1880 he wrote, "lam 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEB 123 

old enough to be done with work, only 
I feel that my best words have not been 
said, after all." Lovers of Whittier's 
poetry could ill have spared such a final 
volume as that entitled At Sundown, 
which appeared for public reading (it 
was first privately circulated) the year 
before his death, and contained, among 
other things, those benignly beautiful 
lyrics, u Burning Driftwood," "The 
Wind of March," and "The Last Eve 
of Summer," together with the tender, 
tranquilly reverential tribute to Holmes, 
literally Whittier's swan song, and 
lovely enough to fit the legend. 

Whittier was spared the death in life 
of a long illness. In the early summer 
of 1892 he had gone to Hampton Falls, 
New Hampshire, but a few miles from 
Amesbury, to spend some weeks in the 
company of chosen spirits, making his 
home with Miss Sarah A. Gore, the 
daughter of an old and dear friend 
memorialised in the poem "A Friend's 



124 JOHN GBEEKLEAF WHITTIEE 
Burial. " It was liis intention to go on 
later to Centre Harbor, one of his ac- 
customed haunts. He had suffered from 
an attack of grippe the preceding winter, 
and in this environment improved fast 
and found refreshment and pleasure. 
" I have not known such a rest for forty 
years/' he said. u Not one pilgrim for 
three weeks" — the designation of the 
vulgar curiosity-monger as " pilgrim " 
being a euphuism which suggests the 
man's kindly, gentle nature. Here, in 
the heat of mid- August, he wrote letters, 
attended morning Bible readings, com- 
posed the poem to Holmes for At Sun- 
down, and read the proofs of that volume. 
Old associations made the place dear to 
him. Sitting beneath the trees one day, 
he cried : "This is a very sweet spot to 
me. I used to come here with my 
mother ! ' ? From a second-story balcony, 
where he often sat, he could look across 
the wide meadows, and see the ships ad- 
venture upon the wider ocean. So peace- 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 125 

ful and happy was this sojourn that, 
when the Centre Harbor plan was 
broached, he decided to remain where 
he was. And then he was seized by one 
of the attacks not unusual to him in 
the hot season, and at first not deemed 
serious. But on September 3 a slight 
paralytic shock was the beginning of the 
end ; and, after five days of comparatively 
painless ebbing away of strength, he was 
at peace, and the bells of Haverhill and 
Amesbury were tolling the eighty-four 
years of his age. On September 10 
the funeral took place at Amesbury, 
"in the plain and quiet way of the So- 
ciety of Friends, " as Whittier had re- 
quested. The body lay in the little 
parlour ; but the services, with exquisite 
fitness, were held in the garden he had 
carefully cherished and loved, into whose 
trees and flowers he had looked for many 
years from his writing-room. The day 
was one of autumn's benedictions. Mr. 
Stedman and others spoke; and the 



126 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

Hutchinsons lifted their worn sweet 
voices in song. In its simplicity and 
absence of all the conventions that make 
death twice gloomy, the scene was in 
delicate consonance with the man who 
was mourned — the poet of nature and 
of humanity. 

In the section of the picturesque 
Amesbury burying-ground set apart for 
the Friends Whittier was laid beside his 
kin — they were seven when he joined 
them : father and mother, uncle and 
aunt, brother and sisters — the broken 
circle of Snow- Bound now reunited for the 
long sleep. Simple stones mark their 
high resting-place, which looks down 
from its vantage-point upon the valley 
town, and is near the Merrimac as its 
waters hasten to meet the sea. Close 
to his birthplace, among the fair things 
of sky, hill, and field upon which his 
hand has set a second seal of loveli- 
ness, he takes his rest, and has left the 
world 



JOHN GKEENLExlF WHITTIER 127 

"A blameless record shrined in* death- 
less song." 

Both the Haverhill and Amesbury 
houses, touchingly interesting memorials 
to all who love Whittier, are now open 
to the public, and are preserved as 
nearly as may be with all the personal 
effects which make them shrines of the 
poet. The late James Carlton, of Haver- 
hill, left a sum of money which is applied 
to this high purpose. At Amesbury a 
company of women, known as the Whit- 
tier Home Association, has rented the 
cottage from Mrs. Pickard, the poet's 
niece, with the hope of purchasing it in 
time. There are custodians in both 
houses, which in these days of the trol- 
ley are easily accessible. No more 
charming summer- day pilgrimage can 
be imagined. 

Whittier' s place in the native song is 
not merely an historical thing. It is 
present and living. His laurels as a 
major bard were won and worn long 



128 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 
before lie died. His contemporaneous 
influence was great. We are now far 
enough, removed in time to look back 
upon his literary work with an analytic 
eye. There has been gain in literary 
art, in the knowledge and practice of the 
writing craft in the United States since 
Whittier's prime. It was easier to win 
fame then than it is now. His artistic 
aspects and limitations are apparent. 
His measures are as simple as his mean- 
ings are direct and clear. He does not 
give us nuts to crack, as does Browning. 
But there is danger in our critical esti- 
mates to-day of over-emphasis on art or 
so-called originality at the expense of 
life. Whittier's verse in its union of 
moral purpose with the sense of beauty 
— it might be said that the one rhyme 
of his poetry is that made by beauty and 
duty — points to the true source of vital- 
ity for all literature which is to survive 
its own day and to interest, please, and 
help large numbers of men and women. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 129 

Whittier's steady hold upon the masses 
and classes — go to the schools and li- 
braries of the land to see how little it has 
changed — is thus to be explained. The 
critical award of a distinct place amongst 
our elder singers — quite as definite and 
worthy as that of Bryant, Emerson, and 
Longfellow, of Lowell and Holmes — is 
but the same testimony from another 
point of view. Eural New England, 
New England of the plain people, 
finds through John Greenleaf Whittier 
its most authentic expression in litera- 
ture. The poet of a section — and what 
a section ! as Mr. Stedman exclaims — 
becomes, for the very reason that he so 
honestly reflects his own environment, 
a representative and treasured national 
poet — the common paradox of literary 
history. 

Yet, as one thinks of Whittier in the 
interpretative light of his life, what he 
was seems full as impressive as what he 
gave the world as a writer. The man 



130 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

looms up larger than his work. This is 
as he would have it. He was, aside 
from his great gifts, a good man, in- 
tensely lovable and much beloved. His 
life was sweet and true and high. 
Among his books in the Amesbury house 
is a quaint little copy of Thomas a 
Kempis, bound in faded leather, contain- 
ing this marked passage: " Esteem not 
thyself better than others, lest perhaps 
thou be accounted worse in the sight of 
God, who knows what is in man" ; and 
Whittier was a humble- minded and 
very true follower of the Christ-life. 
He once said, referring to posthumous 
reputation, u What we are will then be 
more important than what we have done 
or said in prose or rhyme." His nat- 
ural gift for song, his sincere love for 
his fellow-men, and his wholesome rev- 
erence for righteousness are traits not 
to be distorted by changes of literary 
models nor blurred by the passing of 
time. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY. 

The chief source of biographical in- 
formation concerning Whittier is the 
Life and Letters by Mr. S. T. Pickard. 
The standard edition of Whittier' s com- 
plete works is the "Eiverside Edition/ 7 
in seven volumes (Boston and New York: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1888-89). The 
same firm publishes a complete one- 
volume " Cambridge Edition" of the 
poems (1894). Of supplementary vol- 
umes, throwing welcome side-lights on 
Whittier, there are, besides the refer- 
ences given below : Authors at Home, 
edited by J. L. and J. B. Gilder (New 
York and London: Cassells, 1888); Chap- 
ters from a Life, by Elizabeth Stuart 
Phelps Ward (Boston and New York: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1896); and 
Cheerful Yesterdays, by Colonel T. W. 
Higginson (Boston and New York: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899). 

I. John Greenleaf Whittier : His 



132 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Life, Genius, and Writings. By 
W. S. Kennedy. (Boston: S. B. Cas- 
sino, 1882.) Contains valuable mate- 
rial, but is not altogether reliable as to 
fact, and necessarily is incomplete. 

IL John Greenleaf Whittier. By 
P. H. Underwood. (Boston : J. E. Os- 
good & Co., 1883.) A sympathetic 
study by a friend, but of course not car- 
rying the story to the end. 

III. Poets of America. By E. C. 
Stedman. (Boston and New York : 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885.) Con- 
tains an admirable critical study of the 
poet, pp. 95-133. 

IV. American Literature. 1607- 
1885. By Charles F. Eichardson. (New 
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1888.) Vol. 
I., chap. 6, Poets of Freedom and Cult- 
ure : Whittier, Lowell, and Holmes. 
Has value as appreciation. 

V. Life of John Greenleaf Whit- 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 133 

tier. By W. J. Linton. In " Great 
Writers Series." (London : Scott, 1893.) 
A good, succinct appreciation by an ar- 
tist and poet. 

VI. Life and Letters of John Green- 
x leaf Whittier. By S. T. Pickard. 

Two volumes. (Boston and ~New York: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1894.) The 
comprehensive and authoritative biog- 
raphy. 

VII. Authors and Friends. By Annie 
Fields. (Boston and New York: Hough- 
ton, Mifflin &Co., 1896.) " Whittier: 
Notes of his Life and of his Friend- 
ships. n pp. 263-335. An intimate 
and beautiful memorial by a friend. 

VIII. Library of the World's Best 
Literature. Edited by Charles Dud- 
ley Warner. (New York: E. S. Peale 
& J. A. Hill, 1897.) Volume XXVII. 
contains a capital estimate of Whittier 
by Professor G. E. Carpenter. 



134 BIBLIOGBAPHY 

IX. American Lands and Letters. 
ByD. G. Mitchell. (New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons, 1898. ) Has a brief but 
charming characterisation. 

X. American Bookmen. By M. A. 
DeWolfe Howe. (New York: Dodd, 
Mead & Co., 1898.) "Whittier and 
Lowell/ 7 pp. 242-265. An excellent 
sketch. 

XL The New England Poets. By 
W. C. Lawton. (New York and Lon- 
don : The Macmillan Company, 1898. ) 
Contains (pp. 155-194) a perceptive 
and well-tnrned stndy of Whittier. 



The BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE, Editor. 



The aim of this series is to furnish brief, read- 
able, and authentic accounts of the lives of those 
Americans whose personalities have impressed 
themselves most deeply on the character and 
history of their country. On account of the 
length of the more formal lives, often running 
into large volumes, the average busy man and 
woman have not the time or hardly the inclina- 
tion to acquaint themselves with American bi- 
ography. In the present series everything that 
such a reader would ordinarily care to know is 
given by writers of special competence, who 
possess in full measure the best contemporary 
point of view. Each volume is equipped with 
a frontispiece portrait, a calendar of important 
dates, and a brief bibliography for further read- 
ing. Finally, the volumes are printed in a form 
convenient for reading and for carrying handily 
in the pocket. 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. 
2 Pierce Building, Copley Square, Boston. 

[over] 



The BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 



The following volumes are issued: — 

Louis Agassiz, by Alice Bache Gould. 
Phillips Brooks, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. 
John Brown, by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. 
Aaron Burr, by Henry Childs Merwin. 

James Fenimore Cooper, by W. B. Shubrick Clymer. 

Stephen Decatur, by Cyrus Townsend Brady. 

Frederick Douglass, by Charles W. Chesnutt. 

David G. Farragut, by James Barnes. 

Ulysses S. Grant, by Owen Wister. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Mrs. James T. Fields. 

Father Hecker, by Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr. 

Sam Houston, by Sarah Barnwell Elliott. 

11 Stonewall" Jackson, by Carl Hovey. 

Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas E. Watson. 

Robert E. Lee, by William P. Trent. 

James Russell Lowell, by Edward Everett Hale, Jr. 

Thomas Paine, by Ellery Sedgwick. 

Daniel Webster, by Norman Hapgood. 

John Greenleaf Whittier, by Richard Burton. 

The following are among those in preparation : — 

John James Audubon, by John Burroughs. 
Edwin Booth, by Charles Townsend Copeland. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Frank B. Sanborn. 
Benjamin Franklin, by Lindsay Swift. 

Alexander Hamilton, by James Schouler. 

Henry W. Longfellow, by George Rice Carpenter. 

Samuel F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge. 



THE WESTMINSTER BIOG- 
RAPHIES. 



The Westminster Biographies are uniform in plan, 
size, and general make-up with the Beacon Biographies, 
the point of important difference lying in the fact that they 
deal with the lives of eminent Englishmen instead of 
eminent Americans. They are bound in limp red cloth, 
are gilt-topped, and have a cover design and a vignette 
title-page by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Like the 
Beacon Biographies, each volume has a frontispiece por- 
trait, a photogravure, a calendar of dates, and a bibli- 
ography for further reading. 

The following volumes are issued: — 

Robert Browning, by Arthur Waugh. 

Daniel Defoe, by Wilfred Whitten. 

Adam Duncan (Lord Camperdown), by H. W. Wilson. 

George Eliot, by Clara Thomson. 

Cardinal Newman, by A. R. Waller (in press). 

John Wesley, by Frank Banfield. 

Many others are in preparation. 



SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers, 
2 Pierce Building, Copley Square, Boston. 



May-18.1*XM 



MAY 2 1901 



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