CHAPTER XIV

THE GOOD OLD MAN

Longfellow was one of the best-natured men in the world. He was always

pleasant and obliging to everybody who came to see him. He wrote his

autograph for all the children who asked him. Once there was a school

celebration in his honor. He was present and made a beautiful little

speech, in which, among other things, he thanked the children of

Cambridge for the arm-chair. When the exercises were over the children

crowded about him and he wrote his name in their albums until he could

write no more, his hand was so tired. But he told those who had not got

his autograph that he would write it for them if they would come around

to his house.

Many children went to see him on other occasions, and he was always very

kind to them. Everybody loved him.

We have mentioned many of the men who were his friends. Another was

Professor Agassiz, the great scientist and professor at Harvard College,

who was a warm and intimate friend of Longfellow’s.

After a time these friends began, one by one, to die. Agassiz died,

Sumner died, and a number of others. Hawthorne had died some years before.

Longfellow lived a sad life after the terrible accident that killed his

wife, and was getting to be a very old man. Every one tried to honor him.

He knew that he was accounted the greatest poet America had produced.

His sons and daughters were about him and took excellent care of him.

Nevertheless, he began to weary of life a little, and longed to join the

dear ones who had gone before.

It is autumn; not without,

But within me is the cold.

Youth and spring are all about;

It is I that have grown old.

He still wrote many beautiful poems, such as the “Tales of a Wayside

Inn,” “Keramos,” and others. He even wrote a poem on the death of

Garfield a short time before he himself died. But none of these poems

became as famous as those he had written in earlier years in the prime

of his manhood.

At last, on the 24th of March, 1882, he died, and the whole country went

into mourning for him.

His soul to him who gave it rose;

God lead it to its long repose,

Its glorious rest!

And though the poet’s sun has set,

Its light shall linger round us yet,

Bright, radiant, blest.

NOTE.—The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &

Co. for their kind permission to use selections from the copyrighted

works of Longfellow.

THE STORY OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

[Illustration: _JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER_]

WHITTIER

CHAPTER I

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME

The Quaker of the olden time!

How calm and firm and true,

Unspotted by its wrong and crime,

He walked the dark earth through!

The Quaker, with his broad-brimmed hat, his queer, old-fashioned coat,

and his habit of saying “thee must” and “thee must not,” was not only an

honest man, but a good-natured, sensible man as well. The poet Whittier

was a good Quaker, as “calm and firm and true” as the Quaker in his poem.

He was also fond of children, and his best poems are about children and

childhood days.

It is only a little over two hundred years since the first Quakers

appeared. Whittier’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Whittier, was

said to be a Huguenot by descent. He came from England, however, as a

Puritan, and held various offices in the Puritan church in Salisbury and

Haverhill, in northeastern Massachusetts, where he settled.

It happened that two Quakers, Joseph Peasley and Thomas Macy, who had

come to Haverhill, were arrested and fined for “exhorting” on the Lord’s

day. They did it in their own houses; but in those Puritan times, all

the exhorting had to be done in church by regular ministers. Thomas

Whittier thought these men had been treated rather unjustly, and he and

others petitioned the legislature, or General Court, to pardon them.

But the old Puritans thought these petitioners about as bad as the

“heretics” themselves, as the Quakers were regarded, and notified them

that they must take back their petition or be punished. Thomas Whittier

and Christopher Hussey, though not Quakers, refused, and were deprived of

their right to vote, or, as it was called, “their rights as freemen.”

Thomas Whittier was such a good, sensible man, however, that the people,

although he was suspended from voting, had to ask him to help them

do various things in the church; and after a while the General Court

restored his “rights as a freeman.” He himself never became a Quaker,

but his son married a daughter of Joseph Peasley, and so most of the

Whittiers after that were Quakers. Yet there were some who were not; for

history tells of a Colonel Whittier about the time of the Revolution. He

could not have been a Quaker, for no good Quaker ever goes into the army.

The Quakers are a peculiar people. They do not believe in fighting or

going to war on any account. They are always for peace. The poet Whittier

was opposed to war, and often wrote against it; and he refused to favor

the Civil War, which freed the slaves, although he had himself been for

many years a great antislavery reformer, along with his friend William

Lloyd Garrison. But he admits that he had a sort of diabolical liking

for the army and war, and once he wrote a war poem and had it published

anonymously. He thought no one would ever know who wrote it, for it

didn’t sound much like a Quaker; but when he had become an old man some

one did find it out, and he had to admit that he was its author.

Another thing the Quakers will not do is to swear, either in a profane

way, or before a court of justice. They declare that the Scriptures say,

“Swear not at all,” and that it is just as wrong to swear in court as in

anger. They are not great talkers; and in meeting, if no one has anything

to say that is worth saying, they think it much better to sit in silence

for an hour than to listen to a dull sermon.

Your grammars will tell you that it is just as incorrect to say “thee

is,” or “thee must,” as it is to say “me is,” or “him ought.” It seems

strange that most of the Quakers in the world, from the earliest time,

should make a grammatical blunder like this. Of course Whittier, and many

others, knew it was not correct; but they said that Quakers had used this

form of speech from the very first, and they would not try to change the

custom.

These queer people also said they were plain, sensible folk, and

therefore would not cater to the “world and the devil” by wearing fine

clothes. All dressed in the same way, in what was called Quaker drab,

the men with broad-brimmed beaver hats, the women with plain bonnets of

black or “dove-colored” silk, unadorned with ribbons or other ornaments.

Neither did they have any music, nor indulge themselves in any

unnecessary luxuries. They were sharp and shrewd, however, and as we

shall see in the case of Whittier, did not forbear to have a little fun

now and then.

The Puritans had revolted from the Church of England, and came to America

for religious freedom. The Quakers had likewise revolted from the

established forms of worship, but their belief was very different from

that of the Puritans.

At first the Puritans in Massachusetts thought they would keep the

Quakers out of their colony. They therefore punished severely every one

who dared to come among them. They condemned four of them to death, and

others they whipped and imprisoned and banished. But these persecutions

did not prevent the Quakers from coming to Massachusetts, and finally the

Puritans became ashamed of their intolerance, and left them to themselves.

CHAPTER II

A FARMER’S BOY

The first Thomas Whittier, after he married, built a log house, not far

from the present Whittier homestead; but when he grew old and became

well-to-do he put up what was then a fine house. This was as long ago as

1688, or thereabouts.

In this house, which is still standing, the poet John Greenleaf

Whittier was born, December 17, 1807. His father was nearly fifty at

the time of his birth, and twenty-one years older than his mother. His

grandfather was about the same age when his father was born, and his

great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were equally old at the

births of their sons.

On his mother’s side Whittier was descended from a remarkable old

preacher named Stephen Bachiler. This man had deep-set, bright eyes, and

handsome features, which were inherited by most of his descendants, many

of whom became famous men. One was Daniel Webster, who looked very much

indeed like Whittier. Both had the Bachiler eye and brow.

New England farm life is not easy or pleasant, though Whittier never

admitted that he didn’t have a first-rate time when he was a boy, as

you may see by reading “Snow-Bound.” His father’s family had to raise

most of the food they ate. They had no comfortable sofas, and the chairs

were very straight-backed. Besides, they did not succeed very well in

keeping warm in the winter. As they thought it was necessary to toughen

themselves, they went out on very cold days without much clothing on.

Indeed, they probably had but very few warm clothes. There were no such

things in those days as heavy flannels or great overcoats. The cloth in

their garments was spun and woven at home by the mother, and she did

not always get the threads very close together. So there were a great

many spaces for the wind to blow through. Of course they had to go to

meeting every First-day (Sunday), and as there were no fires in the

meeting-house, they suffered much from the cold in winter.

Even the dwelling houses were not very warm. There was only one fire,

and it was built in a chimney-place so large that there was room for

benches inside the chimney next to the fire. Then the wind would come in

through the cracks and crevices; and while it was very hot before the

fireplace, a little way back it was cold. It would often happen on cold,

windy nights that their faces would burn while their backs were almost

freezing. And the bedrooms were like ice-chests, and never warm except in

summer, when they were sure to be too hot. Whittier was sickly all the

latter part of his life; and he laid his trouble largely to exposure in

childhood; for he was always delicate. He lived to be very old, however,

as did all his ancestors.

This was the unpleasant side to his boyhood; of the pleasant side

Whittier himself has told us. If you wish to know what good times he had

in the summer season, read the “Barefoot Boy”:

Blessings on thee, little man,

Barefoot boy with cheeks of tan!...

From my heart I give thee joy—

I was once a barefoot boy!

It is only the country boy who knows—

How the tortoise bears his shell,

How the woodchuck digs his cell,

And the ground-mole sinks his well;

How the robin feeds her young,

How the oriole’s nest is hung;

Where the whitest lilies blow,

Where the freshest berries grow,

Where the groundnut trails its vine,

Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine.

But it is in “Snow-Bound,” his greatest and most beautiful poem, that we

hear of all the pleasant times which the farm boy has in winter, and also

all about the members of Whittier’s own family. He begins the poem by

telling how the snowstorm came up, and then goes on—

Meanwhile we did our nightly chores,—

Brought in the wood from out of doors,

Littered the stalls, and from the mows

Raked down the herd’s-grass for the cows.

Every farmer boy knows what “chores” are. The fun came the next morning

when their father, “a prompt, decisive man,” wasting no breath, said,

“Boys, a path!” You must go to the poem itself to read about the

Aladdin’s cave they dug in the snow, and the other things they did. “As

night drew on,” says the poet,

We piled with care our nightly stack

Of wood against the chimney back,—

The oaken log, green, huge and thick

And on its top the stout back stick;

The knotty forestick laid apart,

And filled between with curious art

The ragged brush; then, hovering near,

We watched the first red blaze appear,

Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam

On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,

Until the old, rude-furnished room,

Burst flower-like into rosy bloom....

Shut in from all the world without,

We sat the clean-winged hearth about

Content to let the north wind roar

In baffled rage at pane and door;

While the red logs before us beat

The frost line back with tropic heat;

And ever, when a louder blast

Shook beam and rafter as it passed,

The merrier up its roaring draught

The great throat of the chimney laughed.

The house dog on his paws outspread

Laid to the fire his drowsy head,

The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall

A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;

And, for the winter fireside meet,

Between the andirons’ straddling feet,

The mug of cider simmered slow,

The apples sputtered in a row,

And, close at hand, the basket stood

With nuts from brown October’s wood.

Whittier was nearly sixty years old when he wrote this poem, and perhaps

he had forgotten partly the hardships of his boyhood; but the poem is so

great because it is so simple and natural and true. It may seem strange

that the greatest work of a great poet is no more than a description

of his every-day home when he was a boy. Whittier’s home was not finer

nor better than anybody else’s home—than yours or mine; in fact, in

comparison with what we have, it was very poor indeed. Yet Whittier

made this wonderful poem about it. That shows how great a poet he was.

Only a great poet could take a barefoot boy, or a snowstorm, or a

common farmhouse and write such beautiful verses about it. Think of this

carefully, and you will come to understand what good poetry really is.

CHAPTER III

WHITTIER’S FAMILY

Most people are blessed with brothers and sisters, with whom they grow

up. First one and then the other is sent away to school. Soon they are

all out in the world, earning livings for themselves; they get married

and have families of their own; and before long they seem to forget the

home of their childhood. But Whittier did not get married, and one of his

sisters did not marry. He lived on the farm most of the time till he was

thirty years old, when he moved with his mother and sister to Amesbury.

We are therefore more than usually interested in knowing about the

members of the family in which he was born.

First, there was his father. He was a plain matter-of-fact man, and did

not believe in poetry; and so, in this, young Greenleaf received very

little encouragement from him.

The encouragement in his poetic efforts, which the father failed to give,

he got from his mother, sisters, and brother, who were all proud of him.

His mother was a dear, sweet Quaker lady, as saintly as she was lovely.

Her face was full and fair, and she had fine, dark eyes. She appreciated

poetry and all fine and delicate sentiments, and for fifty years she was

the guide, counselor, and friend of her illustrious son.

Greenleaf had a brother, Matthew Franklin, several years younger than

himself, who outlived every one else in the family except the poet. He

had also two sisters, the eldest of the family, and the youngest. The

elder sister, Mary, married and lived in Haverhill; but the younger never

married, and was the poet’s intimate friend and housekeeper until both

were old. In “Snow-Bound” the reader will find this beautiful description

of her, lines as sweet and beautiful as the poet ever wrote:

Upon the motley-braided mat

Our youngest and our dearest sat,

Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,

Now bathed within the fadeless green

And holy peace of Paradise....

I tread the pleasant paths we trod,

I see the violet-sprinkled sod

Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak

The hillside flowers she loved to seek,

Yet following me where’er I went

With dark eyes full of love’s content.

...

And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,

Am I not richer than of old?

Safe in thy immortality,

What change can reach the wealth I hold?

What chance can mar the pearl and gold

Thy love hath left in trust with me?—

And when the sunset gates unbar,

Shall I not see thee waiting stand,

And, white against the evening star,

The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

The poem “Snow-Bound” was written perhaps as a memorial of her. He and

she had been for fifty years as loving and fond as husband and wife, but

held together by a purer, more spiritual bond.

She was a poet like her brother; and to this day, in any complete edition

of Whittier’s poems you will find, towards the end of the volume, “Poems

by Elizabeth H. Whittier,” which he wished to be always printed with his.

In this family there were two other kindly souls. One was Uncle Moses,

a brother of the poet’s father, “innocent of books, but rich in lore of

fields and brooks.” The other was Aunt Mercy, Mrs. Whittier’s sister:—

The sweetest woman ever Fate

Perverse denied a household mate,

Who, lonely, homeless, not the less

Found peace in love’s unselfishness,

And welcome wheresoe’er she went.

Such was the Whittier family, all good Quakers, dressing in Quaker

fashion, and talking in the quaint Quaker way; but they were all cheerful

and ready for enjoyment, and all were fond and devoted and gentle and

ambitious to live well.

CHAPTER IV

STORIES OF THE POET’S CHILDHOOD

The Whittiers seem to have been a simple-minded family. Some stories told

of the poet in his childhood would almost make you think him stupid, but

no one seems ever to interpret them in that way.

He remembered nothing that happened before he was six years old; but

about that time he heard that a neighboring farm had been sold at

auction. The next morning he went out and was surprised to find the land

still there, instead of a big hole in the ground; for he seemed to think

that after the farm was sold it would be taken away.

When he was nine years old, President Monroe visited Haverhill, and

happened to be there on the same day that a menagerie came to town. The

Quaker boy was not allowed to see either. He thought he did not care much

for the wild beasts, but he would have liked to see the greatest man in

the United States. The next day he trudged over to the village, hoping

to see at least some footprints that the great man had left behind him.

He found at last the impressions of an elephant’s feet in the road, and

supposing these to be the tracks of the President, he followed them as

far as he could make them out. Then he went home satisfied that he had

seen the footsteps of the greatest man in the country.

At another time he and his brother calculated that if each could lift

the other by his boot straps, first one lifting and then the other, they

might lift themselves up to the ceiling, and no telling how much higher.

Of course when they tried it they didn’t get very far.

In later life he used to tell a story of how children sometimes suffer

needlessly, and in ways of which their parents little dream. When he went

to ride with his father, they used to walk up a certain hill, in order

to rest the horse. By the side of the road there was a gander, which

had come out from a neighboring farmyard; and he says he would rather

in later life have walked up to a hostile cannon than as a child go by

that gander. But he was ashamed to let his father know his fear, and so

walked past in an agony of dread.

There is also told an interesting story of an ox named Old Butler. One

day Greenleaf went out with some salt for the oxen. He was climbing up

the side of a steep hill when Old Butler, on top, saw him, and came

plunging down. The hill was so steep that the ox could not stop, and in

a moment he would have crushed the young master; but gathering himself

together at the right moment, the creature by a great effort leaped

straight out into the air over the head of the boy. It was the wonderful

intelligence of this ox that saved young Greenleaf’s life.

Another amusing story is also told of this ox. Once a Quaker meeting was

being held in the kitchen. Unexpectedly the ox stuck his head in at the

window. While a sweet-voiced sister was speaking he listened quietly; but

when a loud-voiced brother began to speak, he drew out his head, flung up

his tail, and went off bellowing. This the children thought very funny

and a good joke on the brother.

CHAPTER V

SCHOOL DAYS

Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,

The master of the district school

Held at the fire his favored place.

Its warm glow lit a laughing face,

Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared

The uncertain prophecy of beard.

He teased the mitten-blinded cat,

Played cross-pins on my uncle’s hat,

Sang songs, and told us what befalls

In classic Dartmouth’s college halls.

...

A careless boy that night he seemed;

But at his desk he had the look

And air of one who wisely schemed,

And hostage from the future took

In trained thought and lore of book.

Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as he

Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.

—_Snow-Bound._

Until he was nineteen Whittier went only to the district school, and he

used to say that in all that time only two of the teachers were worth

anything at all. Both of these were Dartmouth students, and are fairly

well described in the above quotation from “Snow-Bound.” One was Joshua

Coffin, Whittier’s first teacher. He came back again some years later,

and often spent his evenings at the Whittier homestead. In later years he

was the poet’s friend and helper in the antislavery cause.

Little Greenleaf started to school when he was very small, and before he

had learned his letters. Among his poems is a sweet little one, entitled

“In School Days.” He begins by describing the schoolhouse:

Within, the master’s desk is seen,

Deep scarred by raps official;

The warping floor, the battered seats,

The jack-knife’s carved initial.

You must read for yourself the story of the little boy and the little

girl, and how the latter said:

“I’m sorry that I spelt the word:

I hate to go above you,

Because,”—the brown eyes lower fell,—

“Because, you see, I love you!”

Of books to read they had not many in the Whittier household, and most of

them were the works of saintly Quakers. The Bible was the chief book, and

that they read until they had it by heart. Joshua Coffin used to bring

various books which he had and read them aloud to the older people, not

paying much attention to the boy of fifteen who sat in the corner and

listened. Once he brought a volume of Burns’s poems and read page after

page, explaining the Scotch dialect. Greenleaf, then a tall, shy lad,

listened spellbound. He had got into what his Uncle Moses called his

“stood.” The teacher saw that he was interested, and offered to leave the

book with him. That was about the first good poetry he had ever heard.

It kindled the fire of poetic genius in his own mind and heart, and he

soon began to write poetry himself. But he was only a farmer’s lad, and

writing poetry does not come easy to one in such surroundings.

While he was in his teens he made his first visit to Boston, staying

with a relative who was post-master of the city. You may imagine how he

looked, a gawky country boy, with broad-brimmed Quaker hat and plain,

homespun clothes. But he wore for the first time in his life “boughten

buttons” on his coat, and his Quaker hat had been covered by his Aunt

Mercy with drab velvet. These made him feel very fine.

He was induced to buy a copy of Shakespeare; and at the table of his

relative was a brilliant lady, who was very kind to him. He had been

warned against the temptations of the town, and you can imagine how

shocked he was to find out that this fine lady was an actress. She

invited him to go to the theater; but he hastily declined, and was almost

ashamed of himself for having bought a volume of plays, even if they were

Shakespeare’s.

Somehow or other a copy of one of the Waverley novels came into the

Quaker home, and Whittier and his sister read it together without letting

their parents know. They read late into the night; and at one time, just

as they were getting to an exciting part, the candle burned out and they

had to go to bed in the dark, for it was quite impossible to get another.

There is a story that Whittier’s first verses were written on the beam

of his mother’s loom. At any rate he wrote verses on his slate in

school, and passed them around among the scholars. One stanza his sister

remembered, and repeated afterward:

And must I always swing the flail,

And help to fill the milking-pail?

I wish to go away to school;

I do not wish to be a fool.

The desk on which the poet wrote his first verses was built by that

original Thomas Whittier, more than a hundred years before Greenleaf was

born. It stood in the kitchen for many years; then it was packed away.

But a few years before Whittier died, a niece of his had it taken out and

repaired, and he used it until the end of his life.

In those old days his sister Mary thought his verses exceedingly fine,

quite as good as those she read in the “Poet’s Corner” of the _Free

Press_. This paper had just been started in Newburyport by William Lloyd

Garrison, who was only three years older than Whittier, but had had every

advantage of education. John Whittier, the father, liked the solid tone

of it, and subscribed. Without letting her brother know, Mary got one

of his poems and sent it anonymously to the editor of the paper. When,

a week or so afterward, the postman came along by the field where the

Whittiers were at work and flung the paper over the fence, Greenleaf

looked at once to see what was in the “Poet’s Corner,” and was immensely

surprised to see his own poem there. He says he simply stood and stared

at it, without reading a word. His father suggested that he had better go

to work; but he couldn’t help opening the paper again and looking at his

own poem.

Another poem was sent, and Garrison wrote a note to introduce it, in

which he said: “His poetry bears the stamp of true poetic genius, which,

if carefully cultivated, will rank him among the bards of his country.”

How strange a prophecy, and how strange the fortune that brought together

the great reformer, William Lloyd Garrison, and the great poet, John

Greenleaf Whittier, when both were so young and inexperienced!

CHAPTER VI

HAVERHILL ACADEMY

It was a happy day for Whittier when his sister sent that stolen poem to

the paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, for Garrison immediately took

a fancy to the author. After printing the second poem sent, he learned

from what part of Haverhill the poems came, and drove out fourteen miles

to see the young author.

He was a neatly dressed, handsome, and affable young gentleman, and came

with a lady friend. As it was a hot summer day, Whittier was at work in

the fields, wearing doubtless little beside an old straw hat, a shirt,

and a pair of overalls. His bashfulness made him wish to avoid seeing

the fine city visitor; but his sister persuaded him. He slipped in at

the back door and changed his clothes, and a long and interesting visit

with Garrison followed. They became fast friends, and in later years were

workers together in the cause of the slave.

Friend Whittier, the old gentleman, came into the room while the two

were having their first talk, and Garrison told him he ought to send

his son away to school. The old gentleman was not at all pleased by the

turn affairs were taking, and told young Garrison that he ought not to

put such notions into the boy’s head. As we have already said, Friend

Whittier, being a matter-of-fact Quaker, did not approve of poetry anyway.

So this time passed by, and Greenleaf was kept at work on the farm.

Garrison gave up his paper in Newburyport and went to Boston, and the

young poet sent his verses to the _Haverhill Gazette_. A Mr. Thayer

was the editor of this paper, and he conceived the same opinion of the

lad that Garrison had. He also went to the old gentleman and urged him

to give his son a classical education. An academy was to be opened in

Haverhill that fall, and young Whittier could attend it and spend part

of each week at home. Two years before, Greenleaf had seriously injured

himself by undertaking some very hard work on the farm; indeed from

this strain he suffered all his life. On account of this, his father

considered the matter more favorably.

Mr. Thayer, the editor, promised to board the young man in his family;

but it was a serious question as to where the small amount of money

needed was to come from. There was a mortgage of $600 on the farm, and

nearly all the ready money that could be obtained went to pay taxes and

interest on the debt. The young man received permission to attend the

academy; but he must pay his own way.

It was not an easy thing to pick up spare change in those days, as the

elder Whittier well knew; but Greenleaf looked cheerfully about. An

opportunity soon appeared. A hired man on his father’s farm occupied his

winters in making a kind of cheap slippers, which he sold for twenty-five

cents a pair. He promised to teach the young poet the art of making

them. It was not hard to learn. During the winter of 1826-27 he made

enough to keep him at the academy six months. He calculated so closely

that he thought he would have twenty-five cents more than enough to pay

his expenses of board, books, and clothes. At the end of the term, sure

enough, he had that twenty-five cents left.

James F. Otis, a noted lawyer, read some of Whittier’s poems, and, like

Garrison, determined to go and find him. He was told that he was a

shoemaker in Haverhill. He says that he found him at work in his shoe

shop, and making himself known to him, they spent the day together in

wandering over the hills, and on the shores of the Merrimac River,

talking about matters literary. Like Garrison, Otis later became an

intimate friend of Whittier.

When the Haverhill academy was opened, Whittier was not only to become

a pupil; but he contributed the ode that was sung. This gave him a sort

of social send-off in the town, and henceforth he was something of a

personage in Haverhill. In the year 1827 he contributed forty-seven

poems to the _Haverhill Gazette_ alone, and forty-nine in 1828.

So the young poet that William Lloyd Garrison discovered and went

fourteen miles to see was beginning to become famous.

CHAPTER VII

THE FRIENDSHIP OF GOOD WOMEN

If Whittier ever had a real love affair, no one seems to have known about

it. The fact is, he was not of the passionate kind. But all his life his

best friends were women, and many a good woman he knew and was fond of,

and he and she became real friends. And of that friendship with him, all

those women, without exception, were proud indeed. In a letter written a

dozen years after his school life began, he says:

“For myself, I owe much to the kind encouragement of female friends. A

bashful, ignorant boy, I was favored by the kindness of a lady who saw,

or thought she saw, beneath the clownish exterior something which gave

promise of intellect and worth. [This was the wife of Mr. Thayer, with

whom he boarded.] The powers of my own mind, the mysteries of my own

spirit, were revealed to myself, only as they were called out by one of

those dangerous relations called cousins, who, with all her boarding

school glories upon her, condescended to smile upon my rustic simplicity.

She was so learned in the, to me, more than occult mysteries of verbs

and nouns, and philosophy, and botany, and mineralogy, and French, and

all that, and then she had seen something of society, and could talk (an

accomplishment at that time to which I could lay no claim), that on the

whole I looked upon her as a being to obtain whose good opinion no effort

could be too great.”

One of these young lady friends, perhaps the very cousin of whom he

speaks, wrote of him years afterwards:

“He was nearly nineteen when I first saw him. He was a very handsome,

distinguished-looking young man. His eyes were remarkably beautiful. He

was tall, slight, and very erect; a bashful youth, but never awkward, my

mother said, who was a better judge of such matters than I....

“With intimate friends he talked a great deal, and in a wonderfully

interesting manner; usually earnest, and frequently playful. He had a

great deal of wit. It was a family characteristic.... The influence of

his Quaker bringing-up was manifest. I think it was always his endeavor

to render less

The sum of human wretchedness.

This, I say, was his steadfast endeavor, in spite of his inborn love of

teasing. He was very modest, never conceited, never egotistic. One could

never flatter him. I never tried, but I have seen people attempt it, and

it was a signal failure. He did not flatter, but told some very wholesome

and unpalatable truths.”

An amusing story is told of Whittier’s love of teasing. At the time it

happened he must have been between thirty and forty. A Quaker sister

named Sophronia Page, who went about preaching to little gatherings of

the Friends, stopped one night at his mother’s house. As most Quaker

bonnets are precisely alike, there is no way of telling them apart

except by the name inside. When Sophronia Page went away she put on Mrs.

Whittier’s bonnet by mistake. When she got to the next stopping place and

saw the name inside, she sent the bonnet back. Whittier noticed it in a

box in the hall, and thought he would have some fun with his mother.

“What does thee think Sophronia Page has done?” he asked her, sitting

down.

“I don’t know, Greenleaf,” she said quietly. “What is it?”

“Something I’m much afraid she will be called up in Yearly Meeting for.”

“I hope she hasn’t been meddling with the troubles of the Friends,” said

Mrs. Whittier, anxiously, referring to some church quarrels.

“Worse than that!” said the young man, while his mother got more and more

excited. “She has been taking other people’s things, and has just begun

to send some of them back.”

With that he went into the hall and brought back the bonnet.

“If thee were twenty years younger I would take thee over my knee!” said

his mother when she saw what it was all about.

Among his other famous women friends was Mrs. Sigourney, the poetess,

with whom he became acquainted in Hartford while he was editing a paper

there. He also knew Lucy Larcom; and it was said at one time that he was

engaged to marry Lucy Hooper, but there was no truth in this. Her death,

shortly afterwards, made him feel very sad. In his poetic works you may

find poems addressed to both these women.

While speaking of women we must not omit a description of that woman who

was to him dearest of all women in the world, his sister Lizzie. This

gifted sister Lizzie was “the pet and pride of the household, one of the

rarest women, her brother’s complement, possessing all the readiness of

speech and facility of intercourse which he wanted; taking easily in his

presence the lead in conversation, which the poet so gladly abandoned

to her, while he sat rubbing his hands and laughing at her daring

sallies. She was as unlike him in person as in mind; for his dignified

erectness, she had endless motion and vivacity; for his regular and

handsome features, she had a long Jewish nose, so full of expression that

it seemed to enhance, instead of injuring, the effect of the large and

liquid eyes that glowed with merriment and sympathy behind it.... Her

quick thoughts came like javelins; a saucy triumph gleamed in her great

eyes; the head moved a little from side to side with the quiver of a

weapon, and lo! you were transfixed.”

During his long life this sister was to Whittier more than sweetheart or

wife, for she had the wit and the sympathy of all womankind in her one

frail form; and Whittier knew it and depended on it for his happiness.

CHAPTER VIII

POLITICAL AMBITION

Young Whittier remained at Haverhill academy only two terms. We have seen

that he paid for the first one by making shoes. The second he paid for by

teaching school. When he went to the committee to be examined for this

school he felt rather nervous; but the committee asked him only for a

specimen of his handwriting, which was very neat and clear.

He decided not to go to college, because he said he wouldn’t live on the

charities of others, and it would have been impossible to get through

college without borrowing money of friends. Poor as he was, Whittier

never borrowed money.

While in Haverhill he wrote a great many poems and articles for the

local newspaper. Garrison was then in Boston editing a temperance paper.

But soon he thought he had something better in view, and concluded to

turn the editorship over to Whittier. Whittier accepted the position

and went to Boston; but he was to edit the _Manufacturer_, not the

_Philanthropist_. Both were published by the same people. This is the way

he writes about his work:

“The _Manufacturer_ goes down well, thanks to the gullibility of the

public, and we are doing well, very well. Have had one or two rubs from

other papers, but I have had some compliments which were quite as much

as my vanity could swallow. Have tolerable good society, Mrs. Hale and

her literary club, etc. I am coming out for the tariff by and by—have

done something at it already—but the _astonisher_ is yet to come! Shall

blow Cambreling and McDuffie sky-high.”

Cambreling and McDuffie were politicians whom he was going to oppose.

We should hardly think that the gentle poet Whittier, Quaker as he was,

would conceive the ambition to become a politician; but he was editing a

political newspaper, and soon got deep into politics and liked it.

He had not been in Boston long when, his father becoming ill, he went

back to the farm and remained there until the old gentleman died,

in June, 1830. He spent all his time in study and writing, however,

and after his father’s death he was asked to edit a political paper

in Hartford, Connecticut. He didn’t know anything about Connecticut

politics; but he took hold and soon learned how matters stood. Everybody

liked him and he made some excellent friends there.

Of course rival political newspapers are always saying sharp things

about one another. After he had been in Hartford a few weeks he opened

a copy of the _Catskill Recorder_ and saw a long article headed “John

G. Whittier,” in which he was abused and ridiculed unmercifully. He hid

the paper so that no one should see it, and went around in fear and

trembling, thinking every one would know about it. Finally he wrote

to the editor of the paper, protesting; but the editor had another

paragraph, saying that, if he was as “thin-skinned” as that, he had

better keep out of politics. Soon after this the New York papers, among

them Bryant’s _Evening Post_, spoke of him and his editorship in a very

complimentary manner, and he felt better.

The fact is, Whittier was a good politician. He managed affairs in

Haverhill for years, and had a sort of party of his own which controlled

things. Once on election day a tipsy man asked for a ride with him into

town, and said that if Whittier would give him the ride he would vote for

his candidate. Usually the man had voted on the other side. Whittier

said, “All right,” and took him along. He supported the man to the polls,

put the right ballot in his hand, and told him to vote. But the fellow

was so intoxicated he was obstinate, and determined to vote the other

way. At the last moment somebody handed him the wrong ballot, and he put

it in the box.

There was in Haverhill district a politician who did not really belong to

Whittier’s party, but who had always been elected after giving written

pledges. After he had been elected in this way for several terms, and

had been forced by Whittier to live up to his promises, he determined to

go in without pledges. Whittier was away, and so he wrote a noncommittal

letter, referring to his past record, and saying he didn’t intend to

pledge himself any further. But Whittier came back in the nick of time,

saw the danger, and went over to see the man, whose name was Caleb

Cushing. Whittier told him he would not be elected unless he signed the

desired pledges. After a while he said he would sign anything Whittier

wrote. So the young politician sat down and wrote a letter, which Mr.

Cushing copied and signed. It was printed as a circular and sent all

around town, and Cushing was elected. Then after he was elected Whittier

watched him closely, and saw that he made good the promises in that

letter. Some time after, he was on the point of being made a cabinet

officer by the party to which Whittier was opposed; but by the use of

this letter Whittier prevented it.

CHAPTER IX

THE GREAT QUESTION OF SLAVERY

It is altogether probable that Whittier would have been elected to

Congress, and have had perhaps a great political career, had it not been

for an act of genuine sacrifice on his part, made for the sake of right

and conscience.

In 1833 Garrison pointed out to him that the country must be roused

on the question of slavery. As a good Quaker, Whittier was already an

abolitionist. He felt deeply the insufferable wrong that American

citizens, even though black, should be slaves under the whip of a master.

In an early poem he cries passionately:

What, ho!—our countryman in chains!

The whip on woman’s shrinking flesh!

Our soil yet reddening with the stains

Caught from her scourging warm and fresh!

What! mothers from their children riven!

What! God’s own image bought and sold!

_Americans_ to market driven,

And bartered as the brute for gold!

When Garrison’s appeal came, Whittier was at home on the farm, having

given up the editorship of the Hartford paper on account of illness.

Caleb Cushing, seven years younger than he, had come home from Europe and

through Whittier’s influence had been elected to Congress. Whittier’s

own name was being mentioned. A life of political ambition seemed to lie

open before him. But with Garrison’s appeal, he began a thorough and

careful investigation of the question of slavery and its abolition in

the United States. At last he wrote a pamphlet entitled “Justice and

Expediency.” It was a brilliant defense of the antislavery position. This

he had published at his own expense, poor as he was. When it was about

ready to appear he hesitated, and considered the situation carefully.

The abolitionists were a poor, despised party. If he cast in his lot

with them, none of the great political parties would have anything to do

with him: he must give up his political ambition, and devote himself to

a cause that would require years for its success, even if it should ever

succeed.

In after times a boy of fifteen, who was ambitious in a political way,

came to him for advice. Whittier said that as a young man his ideal had

been the life of a prominent politician. From this he had been persuaded

only by the appeals of his friends—chiefly Garrison. Taking their advice,

he had united with the persecuted and obscure band of abolitionists, and

to this course he attributed all his after success in life. Then, turning

to the boy, he placed his hand on his head, and said in his gentle voice:

“My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but

noble cause.”

From this time on, for thirty years, Whittier continued to be a very poor

man. He made antislavery speeches sometimes, edited antislavery papers,

wrote antislavery poems, was secretary of antislavery societies. For all

this he was paid very little, and at the same time his health was poor.

He sold the farm which had been his father’s, and moved to Amesbury,

where he lived for the remainder of his life.

His mother and his sister approved of his course, and supported him

in every way. Their enthusiastic help made his life even pleasant. He

thought nothing of poverty or hardship, but only of the great work into

which he had thrown himself. At one time he thought he must mortgage his

home; but a friend came to his assistance, and at last in his old age he

had money and comfort and all that success brings with it.

From this time on, Whittier went through times of terrible struggle and

conflict. Garrison had started his well-known paper, the _Liberator_, in

Boston. To it Whittier contributed the poem from which we have quoted

the verse on page 44. In 1835 he was elected to the legislature by his

fellow townsmen of Haverhill.

While attending a special session of the legislature that year, he saw

the mob which came near hanging Garrison, and saw the rope about his

friend’s neck as the crowd hurried him around the corner of a street.

The riot started in an attempt to break up a meeting of the Female

Antislavery Society, which Whittier’s sister was attending. When he heard

of the outbreak he hurried off to the rescue of his sister; but she and

the other women had escaped; and the police finally saved Garrison and

took him to the jail for protection.

CHAPTER X

HOW WHITTIER WAS MOBBED

We must now mention a few exciting events in which Whittier himself took

part. At the time of the occurrences referred to in the last chapter,

George Thompson, an eloquent English reformer who had helped to secure

the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, came to Boston to speak

against slavery in the United States. It happened that the good people of

the churches thought that the easy way to remove slavery was to send the

slaves back to Africa, and for this they took up collections. Garrison

and Whittier came out strongly against this weak-kneed plan, and George

Thompson helped them. Of course, the church folk were angry; and all the

business men were angry, because they said it spoiled business to stir

up this agitation. As a result, the rough characters in every town saw a

chance to have sport, and did all they could to break up the meetings of

abolitionists. The good church people and all the well-to-do and solid

members of the community were so angry that they wouldn’t do anything

to stop the mobs; and the result was that, wherever the speakers went,

stones and rotten eggs were thrown at them, and abuse of all sorts was

heaped upon them.

They got up a cry against George Thompson especially, that he was an

Englishman who had come over to try to steal American business; for in

those days Americans were very jealous of England. They said Thompson’s

antislavery speeches were intended simply to stir up a quarrel between

the Northern people and the Southern, so that England could step in and

get their business. Handbills were thrown broadcast in Boston offering

one hundred dollars to the first person that would lay violent hands on

him.

The first mob was the one Whittier saw in Boston, from which his sister

narrowly escaped. The rioters were after Thompson; but not finding him,

they took Garrison instead.

A little later Thompson came to Haverhill and stopped with the Whittiers.

He and the poet immediately set out on a tour into New Hampshire. With

Thompson had come a clergyman named Samuel J. May. He was to have held a

meeting one Sunday in the First Parish meeting-house in Concord, but the

committee refused to allow him to speak on slavery, and another church

was obtained.

At half-past seven he began to speak. Every one was listening with

breathless attention, when a stone came through a window. He paid no

attention, but kept steadily on. In a moment another stone came through

the pulpit window, and another big one fell among the audience and

frightened them so they all started for the door. Rev. Mr. May then

decided to close the meeting, and called to the people to receive the

benediction.

It was a good thing he did so, for the steps of the church had been taken

away, and if the crowd had poured out they would have fallen headlong.

A heavily loaded cannon had also been brought up, and would have been

used with terrible effect had the meeting lasted much longer. Whittier’s

sister took one arm of the clergyman, and another young lady the other,

and they got him through the crowd without injury.

Whittier and Thompson had in the meantime gone to meet a still more

violent mob. A man named George Kent arranged a meeting for them in

Concord, Massachusetts, since famous as the home of Hawthorne and

Emerson. Handbills were circulated announcing that George Thompson and

John G. Whittier would hold a meeting “at which the principles, views,

and operations of the abolitionists would be explained.” The selectmen

warned the people who were promoting it that there would be trouble if

they held it; but they persisted.

As the hour for the meeting approached, a great crowd gathered. The

selectmen ordered that the doors should not be opened. Thereupon the

crowd determined that they would find “the incendiary George Thompson,”

and punish him as he deserved; and, with loud threats, they accordingly

set off for the house of George Kent and his “wine cellar.”

On the way they met Whittier. They thought he was Thompson, in spite of

his Quaker coat and the assurances of a gentleman who was with him that

he was not the man, and began to pelt him with rotten eggs, mud, and

stones. Whittier was only lamed a little; but his coat was spoiled by the

decayed eggs so that he could not wear it any more. Years afterward, when

clothes were being sent to the negroes in the South, he donated this

coat.

At last Whittier and his companion escaped into the house of Colonel

Kent, a brother of George Kent, and the colonel convinced the crowd that

Thompson was not there. They therefore pushed on to the house of George

Kent, where he really was. Quite a little company of antislavery people

had assembled there to see Thompson, among them two nieces of Daniel

Webster. But when the crowd arrived, he had left the house by a back

street.

When the mob found that he was gone, they went away to celebrate with

fireworks and bonfires. In the meantime Whittier, anxious for his friend,

changed his hat, and escaping through the crowd went to the house of

George Kent. After a time Thompson came back. So did the crowd, all the

time firing guns, throwing stones, and making a great noise.

At last, early in the morning, a horse and buggy were brought around to

the back door, and Thompson and Whittier got into the vehicle. Then the

gates were thrown open, and, before the crowd knew what was being done,

they drove away at a furious rate and escaped.

They drove fast; but the news had spread before them. They came to an inn

at some distance from Concord. A number of men were telling about the

riot, and exhibiting a handbill calling upon all good citizens to assist

in capturing George Thompson and giving him his deserts.

“How will you recognize the rascal?” asked Whittier.

“Easily enough; he is a tonguey fellow,” said the landlord.

When they were in their carriage ready to drive away, Whittier said, “I

am John G. Whittier, and this is George Thompson.”

The men stared at them until they were out of sight, but did not offer to

lay hands on them.

A year or two later Whittier went to Philadelphia to edit an antislavery

paper. The abolitionists had put up a large, fine building, called

Pennsylvania Hall. Whittier moved his editorial office into it as soon as

it was finished. A series of meetings were at once held in it; but they

did not last long, for one night a mob burned the building, and of course

Whittier’s office, with all his papers, was destroyed.

CHAPTER XI

SOME OF WHITTIER’S FAMOUS POEMS

It is not necessary to tell all the events of those years of struggle and

hardship and poverty. Whittier wrote a great many poems on slavery. A

volume containing one hundred of them was published without his knowledge

in 1837 by Isaac Knapp, publisher of the _Liberator_ in Boston. It was

entitled “Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in

the United States, between the years 1830 and 1838. By John G. Whittier.”

He was in New York when it came out. It was the first edition of his

poems ever published. The next year he edited a volume of antislavery

poems entitled “The North Star,” only a few of which he contributed.

In 1839 the financial agent of the antislavery society, Joseph Healy,

published a volume of poems by Whittier. There were 180 pages in the

book, half of which was devoted to poems on slavery, the remainder to

miscellaneous poems.

So the years passed by, and Whittier and his friends kept up the great

fight against slavery. The poet wrote hundreds of pieces, poetry and

prose, which were published in all sorts of papers all over the country.

Now he was at Haverhill in politics, always working for the cause of the

slave, now in Philadelphia or somewhere else editing a paper; and again

at his home in Amesbury recovering his health.

In the meantime the great cause to which he devoted himself moved

steadily on until the Civil War came and all the negroes were set free.

Whittier did not believe in war; but when it came he urged the Quakers,

who were opposed to fighting, to become nurses, like the nuns and sisters

of the Catholic church, and minister to the sick and wounded.

In 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_ was started in Boston. All the great

writers of the day were to have a hand in it—Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson,

Holmes, and others. Whittier was also invited to take part, and an

edition of his collected poems was published. The _Atlantic Monthly_

paid more for contributions than most other periodicals in those days.

Whittier got fifty dollars for each poem, and had a poem published nearly

every month. He was in very delicate health at this time, and was so

poor that this small amount was a godsend to him. He did not attend the

monthly dinners in Boston, to which all the other literary men went, for

he was a Quaker and did not approve of wine and luxuries; and besides he

was not well enough to go. He sent his poems, however, with modest little

notes, asking Lowell if he thought they would do, and telling him not to

hesitate in rejecting them if he thought them silly. He seemed always to

be afraid lest his beautiful simple poems would be so simple that some

people would consider them foolish.

In 1858 his mother died, and now he lived alone with his sister. She,

too, died in 1864, the last year of the war, and the next year he wrote

“Snow-Bound” as a sort of tribute to her memory. It was published in

Boston in 1866 and at once proved very popular. Whittier made $10,000 out

of the royalties on it. His great regret was that his mother and sister

had not lived to enjoy the benefit of his good fortune.

Two famous poems deserve mention. One is “Barbara Frietchie.” A lady

friend of Whittier heard the story in Washington, and at once said, “That

is a beautiful subject for a ballad by Whittier. It is almost like a

scrap of paper lying around with his signature on it.” So she wrote it

out and sent it to him. Not long after that he wrote the poem, following

the original story almost exactly. Some people afterward declared that it

was not true; but there was certainly an old German woman who kept the

Union flag waving over the rebel troops.

The other poem is “The Barefoot Boy.” Whittier wrote it in memory of his

own boyhood. “For,” says he, “I was once a barefoot boy.” It pleased him

very much, and he sent it up to Mr. Fields, who was then editing the

_Atlantic_, and asked “if he thought it would do.” Mr. Fields thought it

very fine, and said it must go into the edition of Whittier’s works which

he was then publishing.

Whittier was now sixty years old. The struggles of war and politics were

over. The dear ones he loved were dead. To amuse and relieve himself he

wrote those simple, beautiful ballads, which every person has read and

admired. They were among the finest things he ever did. Among them were

“Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and others equally familiar. They

were cheerful and happy, and some were about the days of his childhood.

There was occasionally a tinge of sadness in them, but sadness mingled

with hope.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes;

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

Whittier’s life _might have been_ much easier and much happier. But he

had helped much in the accomplishment of a great work, and he was not one

to regret all his hardships and sufferings.

CHAPTER XII

THE END OF A SUCCESSFUL LIFE

Before closing this short biography we must refer briefly to one or two

interesting anecdotes and circumstances. Whittier was color-blind, at

least as to red and green. He could see no difference between the color

of ripe strawberries and the leaves of the vine. Yellow he thought the

finest color in the world, and perhaps for this reason he preferred the

golden-rod.

When the Peace Jubilee was to be celebrated after the Civil War, Patrick

S. Gilmore, the famous bandmaster, asked Whittier to write an ode for the

occasion. He declined, and then Gilmore offered a prize to the poet who

would contribute the best one. Whittier thought he would write one and

send it anonymously. No notice was taken of it. Some people will point a

moral to this tale by saying, “See what a reputation is!”

Whittier was very fond of pets. Once he had a gray parrot. It was trained

on shipboard and would swear occasionally; but it soon fell into the

quiet ways of its home. One Sunday morning, however, it got on top of

the chimney while the church bells were ringing, and began to dance and

scream and swear, while the poor Quakers inside the house came out and

looked helplessly up at him, wondering how they would get him down. After

that he fell down the chimney and remained in the soot two days. When he

was discovered and taken out he was nearly starved, and died not long

after.

Whittier also had a little bantam rooster which he trained to crow when

he placed it at the door of his niece’s room in the morning. Every

morning Whittier would push open her door and put the rooster on top of

it; and the little fowl would crow lustily until his young mistress was

quite awake.

One day not long after the war the Whittiers received a small box, and

on opening it they were astonished to see little spikes sticking out all

over. Whittier’s niece at once guessed it must be an infernal machine,

and took it out and buried it in the garden. A few days after there came

a letter saying a paperweight, made out of the bullets from a famous

battlefield, had been sent. Then they knew it must be the thing they

thought an infernal machine, and went and dug it up; and after that it

always stood on the poet’s desk.

During the time of the war, Gail Hamilton, a friend of Whittier’s,

embroidered a pair of slippers for him. They were in Quaker gray, but on

them was pictured a fierce eagle, with a bunch of thunderbolts in one

claw. He was looking knowingly around, as much as to say that if he got

a good chance when nobody was looking, he would hurl those thunderbolts.

This was intended as a joke on Whittier, who was a Quaker and opposed to

war, but still had a good deal of the warlike spirit in him ready to

break out at any moment. Whittier used to say, referring to the slippers,

that Gail Hamilton was as sharp with her needle as with her tongue.

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Whittier was given a great

dinner at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston. Nearly all the famous writers

of the day were present. When it came the poet’s turn to respond to the

address of congratulation, he said Longfellow would read a short poem he

had written. He handed a paper to that poet, who read the response.

After that, his birthdays were celebrated more or less regularly, and

often Whittier had to make great efforts to escape the “pilgrims” who

came to Amesbury to see him. Once a party of boys from Exeter Academy

started over to visit him and get his autograph. By accident they were

delayed, and when they reached his house it was the dead of night and the

poet was in bed. He got up, however, and gave them hospitality, writing

in all their books. Before he had finished, one of the boys said, “You

have written only John in my book.”

“I am afraid some of you haven’t even got as much as that,” said he

drily, and took up the candle and went off to bed.

He died on the 7th of September, 1892, at the house of some friends in

New Hampshire, with whom he was staying.

We cannot close this account of the life of the dearest and sweetest of

poets better than by quoting his own words about himself:

And while my words are read,

Let this at least be said:

“Whate’er his life’s defeatures,

He loved his fellow-creatures.

...

“To all who humbly suffered,

His tongue and end he offered;

His life was not his own,

Nor lived for self alone.

“Hater of din and riot,

He lived in days unquiet;

And, lover of all beauty,

Trod the hard ways of duty.

“He meant no wrong to any,

He sought the good of many,

Yet knew both sin and folly,—

May God forgive him wholly!”

Also these lines from “My Soul and I”:

I have wrestled stoutly with the wrong,

And borne the right

From beneath the footfall of the throng

To life and light.

Wherever Freedom shivered a chain,

God speed, quoth I;

To Error amidst her shouting train

I gave the lie.

NOTE.—The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &

Co. for their kind permission to use selections from the copyrighted

works of Whittier.

THE STORY OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

[Illustration: _OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES_]

HOLMES

CHAPTER I

THE TRUE HUMORIST

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the humorist among American poets, always with

a smile around his mouth and a twinkle in his eye, and a kindly little

half-hidden joke in everything he had to say. He was a humorist of the

genuine good-humored sort, the “genial Autocrat,” the kindly and obliging

friend (for did he not write a poem on every possible occasion at the

request of all sorts of people?) How kind, how pathetic, yet how amusing,

are the sweet, quaint lines of “The Last Leaf”:

My grandmamma has said—

Poor old lady, she is dead

Long ago—

That he had a Roman nose,

And his cheek was like a rose

In the snow;

But now his nose is thin,

And it rests upon his chin

Like a staff;

And a crook is in his back,

And a melancholy crack

In his laugh.

I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin

At him here;

But the old three-cornered hat,

And the breeches, and all that,

Are so queer!

And if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

In the spring,

Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough

Where I cling.

Dear Doctor Holmes! He did indeed live to be the last leaf upon the tree;

but to the very end he went scattering his humorous and good-humored

words among his friends wherever he was, making people happier as well as

wiser, more light-hearted as well as more thoughtful, until they turned

from crying to laughing. “The Last Leaf” is a little sad, notwithstanding

its lightness and fun. But there is no sadness in this, the funniest poem

that Holmes ever wrote:

THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS

I wrote some lines once on a time

In wondrous merry mood,

And thought, as usual, men would say

They were exceeding good.

They were so queer, so very queer,

I laughed as I would die;

Albeit in the general way,

A sober man am I.

I called my servant, and he came;

How kind, it was of him

To mind a slender man like me,

He of the mighty limb!

“These to the printer,” I exclaimed,

And, in my humorous way,

I added (as a trifling jest),

“There’ll be the devil to pay.”

He took the paper, and I watched,

And saw him peep within;

At the first line he read, his face

Was all upon the grin.

He read the next, the grin grew broad,

And shot from ear to ear;

He read the third, a chuckling noise

I now began to hear.

The fourth, he broke into a roar;

The fifth, his waistband split;

The sixth, he burst five buttons off,

And tumbled in a fit.

Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,

I watched that wretched man;

And since, I never dare to write

As funny as I can.

CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF OLIVER HOLMES

“In the last week of August used to fall Commencement day at Cambridge,”

remarks the doctor. “I remember that week well, for something happened

to me once at that time, namely, I was born.”

It was in the year 1809—the same year that Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin,

and Lincoln were born—and on August 29. There is still in existence an

old and yellow almanac that belonged once to Dr. Abiel Holmes, Oliver’s

father. On the page given to August the numbers of the days run down the

left-hand side, 1, 2, 3, down to 28, 29, 30, 31. Opposite 29 are two

little parallel lines, used as a star or mark of reference, and at the

bottom of the page the two little lines are repeated, and after them

is written in ink “_son b_.” Of course “_b_” stands for “born.” A few

grains of black sand were scattered over the wet ink to prevent it from

blotting, and some of those grains of sand may be seen glistening there

to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, and the fact of his birth

was thus recorded in the almanac—“_son b_.”

Samuel Johnson was born in 1709; or, as Holmes expresses it, “the year

1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English history by his birth.”

It appeared to strike Holmes as a huge joke that he had been born just

one hundred years after Dr. Johnson, and he amused himself by following

out the parallel of their lives. Every year he used to take down his copy

of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” to see what the big, wise old grumbler was

doing in that year, just a hundred years before. At last, in the year

1884, when he came to the end of Johnson’s life, he said that he felt

that the incubus was raised; he had outlived the ponderous parallel.

The birth of the “laughing philosopher,” as Holmes has been called, took

place in a very old house in Cambridge, close to Harvard College, and

made famous in his poems as “the old gambrel-roofed house.” After the

battle of Lexington, General-in-chief Artemas Ward had made this house

the headquarters for the rallying of the patriots, and General Warren

had stopped there on his way to Bunker Hill. George Washington and other

famous men in those days must often have darkened its doors.

For years it stood, this quaint old house in which Holmes was born and

grew to manhood, and from which he went to Harvard College; but before

he died the property was sold to the University and the house was torn

down. Holmes admitted that it was “a case of justifiable domicide.” He

went to pay it a last visit, and “found a ghost in each and every chamber

and closet,” and to each he said a fond goodbye. When the land was

leveled down he did not care to go that way again.

Oliver’s father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was an orthodox clergyman of the

strictest kind. But he was nearly as good-natured as his son. He was

a handsome young man, and all the girls used to say, “There goes

Holmes—look!”

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson once found a letter written by his

mother when she was a girl, in which she gives some gossip about Dr.

Abiel. He sent it to his friend Oliver Wendell and you can imagine the

doctor’s amusement when he read the following paragraph:

“Now, mamma, I am going to surprise you. Mr. Abiel Holmes, of Cambridge,

whom we so kindly chalked out for Miss N. W., is going to be married and,

of all folks in the world, guess who to! Miss Sally Wendell! I am sure

you will not believe it. However, it is an absolute fact, for Harriet and

M. Jackson told Miss P. Russell so, who told us; it has been kept secret

for six weeks, nobody knows for what. I could not believe it for some

time, and scarcely can now; however, it is a fact, they say.”

Evidently girls a hundred years ago wrote much as they do now.

CHAPTER III

AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT

Oliver Wendell Holmes belonged to one of the most aristocratic families

of Boston, and he seemed proud of it. But he was an aristocrat of the

right sort. Said he: “I go for the man with the family portraits against

the one with the twenty-cent daguerreotype, _unless_ I find out that the

latter is the better of the two.” He said also: “I like to see worthless

rich people yield their places to deserving poor ones, who, beginning

with sixpence or nothing, come out at last on Beacon street and have the

sun come into their windows all the year round.”

He inherited good blood through three lines, each of which was

represented in his own name. The Oliver represents his Boston “blue

blood,” which came to him from both his father’s and his mother’s

family. One of his ancestors was Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver, the

distributor of stamps in Boston, whom the people hated so, though he was

one of the richest of the old Bostonians, had coaches, a chariot, and

negro slaves, as well as good sterling silver plate that exists in the

Holmes and Oliver families to this day.

The Wendell stands for the old Dutch family of Wendells, who had moved

from Albany to Boston, and who came originally from Embden, in East

Friesland, just on the border line between Germany and the Netherlands.

The Wendells are still a wealthy and influential family in Albany, solid

old Dutch burghers. Two of Dr. Holmes’s Dutch ancestors were shoemakers;

one was a fur trader.

Another of Holmes’s forefathers on his mother’s side was Governor Thomas

Dudley, of whom the famous Cotton Mather wrote these verses:

“In books a prodigal, they say;

A living cyclopedia;

Of histories of church and priest,

A full compendium, at least;

A table-talker, rich in sense,

And witty without wit’s pretense.”

Governor Dudley’s daughter, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, from whom Holmes was

descended, was the first American poet. In 1650 she published the first

volume of verse ever written by an American. It came out in London, and

was entitled “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,” and so popular

was it that it went through eight editions. Among the other descendants

of this first American poetess were William Ellery Channing and Wendell

Phillips.

The first Holmes in the genealogy was a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, London.

John Holmes was born near Boston, and went in 1686 to help settle

Woodstock, Connecticut. Holmes’s great-grandmother Bathsheba, the wife

of David Holmes, was a most remarkable lady. She was famous as a doctor

and nurse.

They tell a fine story of her daring, how once, in 1717, when the snow

almost buried the houses after a terrible storm, she climbed out of the

upper window of her house in Woodstock and traveled on snowshoes over

hill and dale to Dudley, Massachusetts, to attend a sick woman. She was

accompanied by two men, who held the ends of a long pole, while she held

on in the middle.

There is another remarkable story told of her. Those were the days of

Indian massacres. When the men went out to work they took their guns with

them, leaving the women in the fort or garrison house.

Once the women when alone asked, “Who will go to the garden for

vegetables?” Bathsheba Holmes alone dared venture out. She got her

vegetables and came back, but not until years afterward did she know in

what danger she had been. Then a solitary, decrepit Indian, broken in

spirit, called at her door to beg for cider, promising to tell her a

story if he got his drink.

She gave him the cider and he told his story. It related to the brave

lady herself. He said that when she went to the garden for vegetables,

on that occasion long ago, he had been hidden in the woods and had seen

her, and had determined to kill her. He had bent his bow and aimed his

arrow well, and in a moment he would have let it fly; but a mysterious

power stayed his arm; he couldn’t shoot. When she had gone safely into

the garden he called himself a coward and determined to have her life

when she came out. But, as she passed on her way back to the fort, the

same power stayed his arm again, and he wondered that he could not kill

a squaw. He had always thought that it was the Great Spirit who held his

arm and saved her life. It was in this mysterious way that God preserved

the line that was finally to give us the “genial autocrat,” the “good

doctor.”

Our poet’s grandfather Holmes was a captain in the French and Indian war,

and a surgeon in the Revolution, dying a year or two before the close of

the latter war.

So you see what a thorough aristocrat, of the true American kind, Oliver

Wendell Holmes was.

CHAPTER IV

CAMBRIDGE

Holmes, the poet, was born and brought up in a poetic town. The old,

yellow, hip-roofed house stood close beside the grounds of Harvard

College; and all around were homes of men who were famous or were to be

famous. Cambridge has always been a quaint, quiet, peaceful, well-bred

town. It stands at the back door of Boston, a half hour’s walk from that

“hub of the solar system.” Elms and poplars line its streets, its houses

look like rich old relics, and everywhere are evidences of comfort and

culture. Imagine how George Washington and General Warren, and all the

Revolutionary heroes walked up and down these streets! Already in the

time of Washington many famous people had lived there; and after him

came a whole procession of great men, one after another—Longfellow,

Emerson, Sumner, Garrison, Motley—their names are too many to mention.

In the center of the town are the Harvard College buildings, of brick and

stone, some old, some new, surrounded by broad green lawns, and some of

them overrun with ivy. Then, running out from the college grounds as a

hub, are streets like the spokes of a wheel. In one direction is Mount

Auburn cemetery, where hundreds of the famous dead lie buried, and which

is the most beautiful cemetery in the United States. In another direction

are Lexington and Concord, while on another side the Charles River flows

serenely along towards Boston Bay.

Everywhere about are to be seen college students and professors. Here is

a dapper young man with a pointed beard—the new professor of English;

there is a bent old man, white-haired, tottering in his gait—he is the

famous professor of Greek. Some of the students are gay and always

cracking jokes; others have deep-set eyes and shabby clothes—“plugs”

the others call them, for they are very serious minded young fellows and

never waste a moment of time. Then there are many more who go singing

and shouting through the streets at late hours in the night, causing the

people who are abed and asleep to be aroused from their slumbers only to

stick their heads out of the windows and silently wish the young fellows

were anywhere but in Cambridge.

Such is this famous college town; and a very enjoyable place it is to

live in. A great many famous people come here to preach in the churches,

or to lecture, or to speak at banquets and meetings. A great many pretty

girls come here to see the sights and visit their brothers—and look at

the crowds of handsome young men.

In this old college town, this young aristocrat, the descendant of

patriots and governors and men of wealth and women of beauty, grew

quietly up to manhood. He went to school, learned his lessons well, but

not too well, never got into trouble, had a good time, and did not fret

or worry about anything, or annoy anybody, even his teachers. There is

a story of a famous feruling that he got—only one—and years afterward

the teacher came to him to apologize. Holmes in a letter tells in his

humorous way how the repentant master came and introduced himself to the

now famous poet, how in an embarrassed manner he recalled old days, and

finally the feruling, and then said he was sorry he had given it. Holmes

declared he had richly deserved it; but the schoolmaster was glad to get

away. Apologizing to a pupil for whipping him is indeed an embarrassing

thing.

It was not at school, however, but in his father’s library that Oliver

learned most. That room in the corner of the old house where were the

dents of the British muskets, was the study, and it was filled from floor

to ceiling, every wall, with books. He says he “bumped about among books

from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father’s or

grandfather’s folios.”

Beside the library, there was the old garden, which he himself has

quaintly described. “There were old lilac bushes at the right of the

entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear tree

which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened,

but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It

was a vulgar specimen at best, and was set there no doubt to preach its

annual sermon. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael

pear tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to

heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly

cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like

those rich men’s sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only

rusted, hardened, and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and

sweet white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days.

“As for the garden beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or

Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rube, a little old

Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but

old-fashioned flowers in them—hyacinths pushing their green beaks through

as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier; tulips, coming up in the shapes

of cornucopiæ; peonies, butting their blunt way through the loosened

earth; lilies, roses—damask, white, blush, cinnamon; larkspurs, lupines,

and gorgeous hollyhocks.

“The yellow-birds used to be very fond of some sunflowers that grew close

to the pear tree with a moral. I remember their flitting about, golden

in the golden light, over the golden flowers, as if they were flakes of

curdled sunshine.”

Oliver had a younger brother John, who was as light of heart and full of

fun as he; and gay times they had together in this quiet old town, and

this old house with its books and its garden. He says that as a boy he

was afraid of the tall masts of ships that used to come up the river,

and he would hide his eyes from them. And he was afraid, too, of a great

wooden hand, the sign of a glove-maker whose shop he sometimes passed.

So in happiness and comfort he dreamed his early years away, with his

brothers and sisters and father and mother. He was like a fine, luscious

pear in that old garden, ripening without rotting at the core, or yet

getting hard and full of cracks.

CHAPTER V

SCHOOL LIFE

When young Oliver was ten, he was sent about a mile away to a school

where one of the pupils was Margaret Fuller, who afterwards became a

famous writer. As a girl, says Holmes, she had the reputation of being

“smart.” Once she wrote a school essay which was shown to the father of

Oliver. It began, “It is a _trite_ remark.” But Oliver didn’t know what

_trite_ meant. It was to him a crushing discovery of her superiority. She

was stately and distant, as if she had great thoughts of her own; she was

a diligent student, and read a great many of what she called “naw-vels.”

“A remarkable point about her,” says Holmes, “was that long, flexile

neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who

loved her compared to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to the

serpent that tempted Eve.”

After five years at this school, Oliver was taken to Andover, and left

at the house of a professor in the theological seminary. He went to

Phillips Academy, where he studied a year preparatory to entering

Harvard College. There he met a rosy-faced boy named Phineas Barnes, and

the two became great friends. Phineas did not go to Harvard College, and

they were soon separated; but they always remained friends, and kept up a

correspondence as long as they lived.

At this time, says one of his biographers, he was an energetic and

lively youngster, full of fun and mischief, with tendencies in the way

of flageolets and flutes, and with a weakness for pistols and guns and

cigars, which latter he would hide in the barrel of the pistol, where his

mother’s eyes would never care to look for them.

One of the objects of most interest to the boys at this school was a

tutor who had had a dream that he would fall dead while he was praying.

He regarded the dream as a warning, and asked the boys to come in turn to

see him before he died. Says Holmes, “More than one boy kept his eye on

him during his devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man had who

followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say hope, of

seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.”

Years later he revisited these scenes. He says that the ghost of a boy

was at his side as he wandered among the places he knew so well: “‘Two

tickets for Boston,’ I said to the man at the station.

“But the little ghost whispered, ‘When you leave this place you will

leave me behind you.’

“‘One ticket for Boston, if you please. Goodbye, little ghost.’”

At last Holmes returned to Cambridge and immediately entered Harvard

College, in “the famous class of ’29.” He had many well-known classmates,

among them the Rev. Samuel Francis Smith, the Rev. Dr. James Freeman

Clarke, and others. Smith was afterwards famous as the author of “My

Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and Dr. Holmes, in one of his poems, thus writes

about him:

And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith,—

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith;

But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,—

Just read on his medal, ‘My country’ ‘of thee!’

Charles Sumner was in the next class below, and the famous historian

Motley two classes below. Though Motley was the youngest student in the

college, he and Holmes afterward became the most intimate of friends,

and so remained through life; and when Motley was dead Holmes wrote his

biography.

Holmes said Motley looked the ideal of a young poet, and he goes on to

describe him: “His finely shaped and expressive features, his large,

luminous eyes, his dark waving hair, the singularly spirited set of his

head, his well outlined figure, gave promise of manly beauty.”

After this description of Motley, read the following which Holmes gives

of himself in a letter to Phineas Barnes:

“I, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Harvard University, am a plumeless

biped of exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of

substantial boots made by Mr. Russell of this town, having eyes which I

call blue, and hair which I do not know what to call.

“Secondly, with regard to my moral qualities, I am rather lazy than

otherwise, and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I am not

dissipated and I am not sedate, and when I last ascertained my college

rank I stood in the humble situation of seventeenth scholar.”

In another letter written when in college to his friend Phineas he says:

“‘What do I do?’ I read a little, study a little, smoke a little, and eat

a good deal. ‘What do I think?’ I think that’s a deuced hard question.

‘What have I been doing these three years?’ Why, I have been growing a

little in body, and I hope in mind; I have been learning a little of

almost everything, and a good deal of some things.”

And in still another letter, he says: “I have been writing poetry like a

madman, and then I have been talking sentiment like a turtle-dove, and

gadding about among the sweet faces, and doing all such silly things that

spoil you for everything else. This month of May is too good for anything

but love.”

CHAPTER VI

COLLEGE LIFE

Holmes was not only born within the present grounds of Harvard, he grew

up there, was a student of Harvard, and a loyal member of the “famous

class of ’29,” a lecturer and professor at Harvard, and he became

Harvard’s most famous poet and man of letters, though Harvard has had so

many that were great. So the life at Harvard College was always a part of

his life; and perhaps that is why he was so merry.

College students are great jokers. In the days of Holmes the students

decidedly objected to going to chapel early in the morning, rising as

they had to do before daylight on cold winter days. To show that they

didn’t like this idea of early prayers, they would sometimes fasten

firecrackers to the lids of the big Bible, so that when the president or

a professor came to lead the exercises and opened the book, they would go

off with a snap.

In those days, too, they had only candles, and as prayers were held

before daylight the chapel candles had to be lighted. Sometimes the

students would put pieces of lead where the wick ought to be, and when

the candles burned down to the lead the lights went out, of course

leaving the chapel in darkness. At other times the president would be

startled on entering the pulpit by seeing a pig’s head standing upright

and bristly on his desk.

The rooms in the college dormitories were very poorly furnished. Instead

of matches they had flint and steel and a tinder-box; and in almost

every room was a cannon ball, which the boys would heat red-hot and set

on a metal frame of some sort to help keep the room warm. Sometimes in

the middle of the night a wicked student or two would send one of these

cannon balls rolling, bump, bump, bump, down the stairs, waking every one

and getting the proctor out of bed. Sometimes, too, the cannon ball was

hot and burned the fingers of the proctor when he tried to pick it up.

Then woe to the young lad who was caught and proved to be the culprit.

In college, Holmes belonged to two or three clubs. One was the Hasty

Pudding Club, which met in the rooms of the members. A worthy old lady

of the village called Sister Stimson prepared the pudding in two huge

pots; and the “providers” of the evening would sling these, filled with

the boiling mush, on a stout pole, and, resting the ends upon their

shoulders, mount gallantly to the room where the members were assembled,

often in the third or fourth story. A bowl of hasty pudding was always

carried to the officer in the entry, as a sort of peace offering; and

when the members had eaten as much as they could, and had told all the

stories they had to tell, the occupants of nearby rooms were invited to

help finish up the repast.

Another club to which he belonged was called the “Med. Facs.,” and each

member or officer had the title of a supposed professor in the Medical

Faculty of the University. The first meeting of the year was held in an

upper room, draped in black cotton and decorated with death’s-heads and

cross-bones in chalk; a table, also hung in black, extended lengthwise

through the room. In the center sat the mock president and about him were

the “professors” and “assistant professors,” all in black. Near at hand

stood two policemen, usually the two strongest men in the class, dressed

in flesh-colored tights. On the stairs outside were crowds of Juniors,

from which twenty or thirty were to be initiated into the society. This

initiation consisted usually in answering disagreeable questions put by

the “professors,” or in doing such things as standing on one’s head,

crawling about the floor, singing Mother Goose melodies, or making a

Latin or Greek oration.

College Commencement in those days was like a country fair. The people

pitched tents on the western side of the college yard (for there were

then no hotels, and boarding was expensive), and opposite them were

various stands and shows, making a street which by nightfall was paved

with watermelon rinds, peachstones, and various refuse, on a ground of

straw,—all flavored with rum and tobacco smoke.

Holmes himself has well described this festival of the college year:

“The fair plain (the Common), not then, as now, cut up into cattle

pens by the ugliest of known fences, swarmed with the joyous crowds.

The ginger-beer carts rang their bells and popped their bottles, the

fiddlers played Money Musk over and over and over, the sailors danced

the double-shuffle, the gentlemen of the city capered in rusty jigs, the

town ladies even took a part in the lusty exercise, the confectioners

rattled red and white sugar plums, long sticks of candy, sugar and burnt

almonds into their brass scales, the wedges of pie were driven into

splitting mouths, the mountains of (clove-sprinkled) hams were cut down

as Fort Hill is being sliced to-day; the hungry feeders sat still and

concentrated about the boards where the grosser viands were served, while

the milk flowed from cracking cocoanuts, the fragrant muskmelons were

cloven into new-moon crescents, and the great watermelons showed their

cool pulps sparkling and roseate as the dewy fingers of Aurora.”

And besides all this, there were the orations of the students, and the

speeches of old graduates who now came back famous, and all the bustle

and importance of the college men themselves, hurrying to entertain

their fair lady friends, their mothers, and their fathers, who had come

up to see how they behaved.

CHAPTER VII

A BUDDING POET

We have already seen in one of Holmes’s letters to Phineas Barnes that

while in college he was “writing poetry like mad.” In the appendix to the

latest complete edition of his poems you will find some lines translated

from the Æneid while he was a student at Andover, not yet sixteen years

old. In college he was poet to the Hasty Pudding Club; had a poem at

Exhibition, one at Commencement, and was elected class poet; besides

that, he joined several classmates in a volume of satirical poems on the

first regular art exhibition in Boston.

When he finished his college course he studied law for a year, though his

father rather wished him to be a clergyman. Says he, “I might have been a

clergyman myself, for aught I know, if a certain clergyman had not looked

and talked so like an undertaker.” Think of the little smooth-voiced

joker in the pulpit! In another place he says, “How grandly the

procession of old clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and

passed the day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes!” You must

remember that Holmes was the son of the orthodox clergyman of Cambridge,

and these were the men who exchanged pulpits with his father.

At first, as an experiment, he studied law for a year; but he did not

work very hard. He was writing poetry. A paper called the _Collegian_ was

started, and he contributed twenty-five or more poems to it, among which

were some of his funniest and best. “The Last Leaf” and “The Height of

the Ridiculous” were among the work of that first poetic year of his. He

never thought much of these poems, though some people consider them quite

as good as the poems of the famous Thomas Hood, who wrote—

“Take her up tenderly,

Lift her with care,—

Fashioned so slenderly,

Young and so fair!”

Because he didn’t like them, or thought them too rollicking, he did not

reprint many of them. Here is one, perhaps the first of his poems ever

printed with his name, which appeared in February, 1830, under the title

“Runaway Ballad”:

I

Wake from thy slumbers, Isabel, the stars are in the sky,

And night has hung her silver lamp, to light her altar by;

The flowers have closed their faded leaves, and drooped upon the plain;

Oh! wake thee, and their dying hues shall blush to life again.

II

Get up! get up! Miss Polly Jones, the tandem’s at the door;

Get up and shake your lovely bones, it’s twelve o’clock and more;

The chaises they have rattled by, and nothing stirs around,

And all the world but you and me are snoring safe and sound.

III

I’ve got my uncle’s bay, and trotting Peggy, too,

I’ve lined their tripes with oats and hay, and now for love and you!

The lash is curling in the air, and I am at your side;

To-morrow you are Mrs. Snaggs, my bold and blooming bride.

Here is another, entitled “Romance”:

Oh! she was a maid of a laughing eye,

And she lived in a garret cold and high;

And he was a threadbare, whiskered beau,

And he lived in a cellar damp and low.

But not all his early poems were nonsense like these. One day, in the

fall of 1830, he read in the _Boston Advertiser_ a paragraph saying

that the Navy Department at Washington intended to break up the frigate

Constitution, which had fought so bravely in the War of 1812, and won

such glory for the American people. Immediately he wrote the following

poem, which stands at the beginning of his collected works:

OLD IRONSIDES.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

The banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon’s roar;—

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,

Where knelt the vanquished foe,

When winds were hurrying o’er the flood

And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor’s tread

Or know the conquered knee;—

The harpies of the shore shall pluck

The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk

Should sink beneath the wave;

Her thunders shook the mighty deep,

And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning and the gale!

This stirring poem was published on the next day but one, and was

immediately copied into nearly every newspaper in the United States.

Copies were even printed as handbills and distributed about the city

of Washington. Because the people felt so badly about it, the Navy

Department at last decided not to break up Old Ironsides.

CHAPTER VIII

DOCTOR HOLMES

Young Mr. Holmes wrote so much poetry he had little time for law during

the twelve months after his graduation. So at the end of the year he gave

up law and began to study medicine. At first he felt his heart come up

into his throat at the sight of skeletons grinning at him from the walls;

and his cheek grew pale as the hospital sheets when he passed among the

sufferers and saw the dead and dying, or helped to perform a surgical

operation; but after a time these things were to him as nothing, mere

every-day affairs.

About the same time, too, he became a collector of rare old books. In

1833, when he had finished his medical education as far as he could at

home, he went to Europe to complete his studies in the hospitals of

Paris and other cities. He remained there two years and a half, and in

that time he had a chance to pick up some rare and queer old volumes.

He returned a full-fledged doctor; but he seems to have felt that he

had neglected poetry long enough, and soon published his first book,

which is dated 1836. He had been invited to read a long and serious poem

before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard, and this he made the chief

poem of his little volume, including more than forty others. Beside the

early humorous poems which we have already referred to, there was the

well-known poem “The September Gale,” beginning,—

I’m not a chicken; I have seen

Full many a chill September,—

and ending,—

And not till fate has cut the last

Of all my earthly stitches,

This aching heart shall cease to mourn

My loved, my long-lost breeches!

George Ticknor Curtis describes the youthful poet in the following bright

paragraph:

“Dr. Holmes had then just returned from Europe. Extremely youthful in

his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled humor and pathos that

have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with coruscations of his

peculiar genius, his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1836, delivered with a clear,

ringing enunciation, which imparted to the hearers his own enjoyment of

his thoughts and expressions, delighted a cultivated audience to a very

uncommon degree.”

Here is another description of the reading of the same poem, which was

printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_:

“A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner, varied with striking

flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem,—now deeply

impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up

almost into an actual flight of rhapsody,—rendered the delivery of this

poem a rich, nearly a dramatic, entertainment, such as we have rarely

witnessed.”

Abraham Lincoln read and admired the poems in this first little volume.

Once, in conversation, he remarked, “There are some quaint, queer verses,

written, I think, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, entitled ‘The Last Leaf,’ one

of which is to me inexpressibly touching.” He then repeated the poem from

memory, and as he finished this much-admired stanza,—

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom;

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb,—

he said, “For pure pathos, in my judgment, there is nothing finer than

those six lines in the English language.” Perhaps Lincoln was thinking

of the lonely grave of his own first love in Illinois, for he once said,

“Oh, I cannot bear the thought of her lying out there with the storms

beating upon her.”

Holmes, having received his degree of M.D. from Harvard College, began

practicing medicine in Boston. He was young and popular, he was related

to the best families, and he had the best medical education the world

could give. The result was that he had plenty of practice. He didn’t

believe much in giving medicine, and his doses were usually very small.

He would enter the sick-room with a bright, cheerful smile on his face

that of itself made the patient soon feel better. In one of his books he

gives this maxim: “When visiting a patient enter the sick-room at once,

without keeping the patient in the torture of suspense by discussing the

case with others in another room.”

Prize medals were offered in Boston for medical essays, and in the first

two years after he began practicing medicine he gained three of these

medals. In 1838, after two years in Boston, he was appointed professor

of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth College. He remained there two

years, at the end of which time he resigned. He then came back to Boston

and married the daughter of Judge Charles Jackson. He and his wife took

a house in the very heart of Boston, in a little court leading out of

Tremont street, and there they lived for nearly twenty years. “When he

first entered that house two shadows glided over the threshold; five

lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—and

one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own.”

Those other shadows were his children, his eldest son being taller than

the doctor himself. In the surrounding houses there had been sorrow and

disappointment and death. “The whole drama of life was played in that

stock company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no

deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling. Peace be to

those walls, forever,” the professor said, “for the many pleasant years

he has passed within them.”

He had two sons and a daughter. The oldest son was named Oliver Wendell,

and became a judge. The other son, Edward, was also a lawyer. The

daughter, named after his wife Amelia Jackson, married Mr. John Turner

Sargent, and it was at her country home at Beverly Farms that Holmes

spent much of his time toward the end of his life.

He practiced medicine again in Boston for seven years, when he accepted

an appointment as professor of anatomy and physiology in Harvard Medical

School. This professorship he held for thirty-five years, when he

resigned on account of old age.

He had a beautiful country home called Canoe Place, in the Berkshire

Hills, in western Massachusetts. There he spent “seven happy summer

vacations, which,” he declares, “stand in his memory like the seven

golden candlesticks seen in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer.”

Some famous literary people lived near by, among them Herman Melville,

the novelist and traveler, and not far away were Miss Sedgwick and Fanny

Kemble, and for a short time Hawthorne. The doctor’s dwelling was a

modest one, he tells us,—“not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of

its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys’ playthings.” This

place had come to him by inheritance from his mother.

CHAPTER IX

THE AUTOCRAT

In 1852 Holmes delivered a course of lectures on the “English Poets of

the Nineteenth Century,”—Wordsworth, Moore, Keats, Shelley, and others.

At the end of each lecture he read a poem, and these poems now appear in

his collected works as “After a Lecture on Wordsworth,” “After a Lecture

on Moore,” etc.

In a letter to an official he states the terms on which he is willing to

give this course of lectures in various towns and cities:

“My terms for a lecture, when I stay over night, are fifteen dollars and

expenses, a room with a fire in it, in a public house, and a mattress to

sleep on,—not a feather bed. As you write in your individual capacity,

I tell you at once all my habitual exigencies. I am afraid to sleep in

a cold room; I can’t sleep on a feather bed; I will not go to private

houses; and I have fixed upon the sum mentioned as what it is worth to go

away for the night to places that cannot pay more.”

The landlady in the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” also has something

to say about his lectures:

“He was a man that loved to stick around home as much as any cat you ever

see in your life. He used to say he’d as lief have a tooth pulled as go

away anywheres. Always got sick, he said, when he went away, and never

sick when he didn’t. Pretty nigh killed himself goin’ about lecturing

two or three winters,—talkin’ in cold country lyceums,—as he used to

say,—goin’ home to cold parlors and bein’ treated to cold apples and cold

water; and then goin’ up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin’

home next mornin’ with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper.”

Perhaps this is why Holmes was not more of a traveler, going to Europe

but twice, and hardly ever leaving his birthplace of Cambridge or his

home in Boston.

So twenty years passed by after he published his first volume of

poems before he did anything else very literary. His fellow professor

Longfellow had become famous; and so had Hawthorne; and so, too, had

Lowell and Whittier. But Holmes seemed to have no desire for fame. He had

written a few amusing poems, and delivered some lectures.

But when the _Atlantic Monthly_ was about to be started, all the literary

folk turned to Holmes and said, “That jolly old fellow could write

something good, if he only would.”

The young publishers, Phillips & Sampson, were enthusiastic about the

new magazine. Lowell was chosen editor, and Francis H. Underwood was

assistant, though the idea was originally his. They called in Longfellow

and Emerson, and Motley and Holmes. This distinguished company met at

a dinner and talked over the new project. Holmes suggested the name

_Atlantic Monthly_. Longfellow would contribute a poem now and then, and

Emerson an essay from time to time; but poems and essays do not fill up

a magazine very fast. So Lowell determined to get something from Holmes,

some light, gossipy prose, that should continue on from month to month.

The doctor remembered that he had written some papers twenty-five years

before for the _New England Magazine_, and he determined to “shake the

same bough again” and see what fruit he could get. So he began where he

had left off all those years before with an “As-I-was-saying.” And for

a year or more, every month in the _Atlantic_, the “Autocrat” gave his

opinions of life, cracked his little jokes on men and things, recited a

poem, or gossiped with his landlady and fellow boarders. And each month

that distinguished literary company met at some hotel or restaurant in

Boston and had a dinner which was a feast of reason and good things for

the mind and heart as well as for the stomach; and Holmes was the wit and

soul of every banquet.

At last Oliver Wendell Holmes had come before the world as a great poet

and a great humorist. The “Autocrat” is the very soul of humor, so

genial, so wise in his good advice, so gay in his good nature, so light

and sparkling and kind. Now was published “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or,

The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”; and by its side that most beautiful of all

the poems Holmes ever wrote, “The Chambered Nautilus.” When the Princess

of Wales asked him to write in her album, he copied the last verse of

“The Chambered Nautilus,” as he had done in the album of many a subject

of our great republic. Listen! Holmes could be stately and beautiful as

well as gay and humorous:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

If you wish to know the wise things Holmes said about anything and

everything, read “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here are a few

bright sayings which you will not find in that book, but which will give

you an idea of the kind of things with which the volume is filled:

“An Indian is a few instincts on legs, and holding a tomahawk.”

“If a doctor has the luck to find out a new malady, it is tied to his

name like a tin kettle to a dog’s tail, and he goes clattering down the

highway of fame to posterity with his æolian attachment following at his

heels.”

Gunpowder: “Chemistry seals up a few dark grains in iron vases, and lo!

at the touch of a single spark, rises in smoke and flames a mighty Afrit

with a voice like thunder and an arm that shatters like an earthquake.”

“The scholar’s mind is furnished with shelves like his library. Each

book knows its place in the brain as well as against the wall or in the

alcove. His consciousness is doubled by the books which encircle him, as

the trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its unruffled waters.

Men talk of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one who loves his

books, and has lived long with them, has a nervous filament which runs

from his sensorium to every one of them.”

“Slang—is the way in which a lazy adult shifts the trouble of finding any

exact meaning in his (or her) conversation on the other party. If both

talkers are indolent, all their talk lapses into the vague generalities

of childhood. It is a prevalent social vice of the time, as it has been

of times that are past.”

Perhaps the most famous expression in the “Autocrat” is that in which he

calls Boston “the hub of the solar system” (often wrongly quoted as “the

hub of the universe”).

“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” was such a success that it sold

the _Atlantic Monthly_ by the thousands of copies. The editors and

publishers both said, “This is just the thing: give us more, give us

more.” So Holmes wrote another book, which he called “The Professor at

the Breakfast Table”; and then “The Poet at the Breakfast Table.”

In the “Autocrat” Holmes said that every man had in him the writing of

at least one novel. As the demand for his work was great, he thought he

would write one. So he produced “Elsie Venner, a Romance of Destiny.” It

is a strange story of a girl who has the nature of a snake. Holmes had

heard of cases like that of Elsie Venner, and he worked her story out

in a scientific manner. We read it as if it were really true, and it

exercises a weird fascination over us.

Later he wrote another novel, entitled “The Guardian Angel.”

CHAPTER X

“THE FAMOUS CLASS OF ’29”

Holmes was the poet of the occasional, if ever there was one. If anybody

held a meeting about anything, and Holmes was asked to read a poem, he

kindly consented to do so. Who ever heard of opening a meeting of a

medical society with a poem? Yet Holmes read an original poem at many a

meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

It was at the yearly meeting of “the famous class of ’29” that he read

his poems oftenest. Every year for sixty years, this loyal poet remained

true to class traditions. A poem from Holmes was always expected, and the

class always got it.

A college class is a band of friends, friends who have passed the

merriest years of their lives together. They come to college from the

country over, from homes poor and rich, distant and near. For four years

they live together, all on an equal footing, all together blooming into

manhood. Then they scatter to their various duties in the world. One is a

lawyer, another a journalist, another a clergyman, another a doctor, and

others are business men. Yet how can they ever forget those happy years

together?

Each year all those members of the class of ’29 who could do so would

come together at Commencement time to renew old memories. Some of the

class were perhaps over seas and in foreign lands; some, alas! were dead.

So, as the years passed by, the number grew smaller and smaller, and the

gathering became sadder and sadder; yet none of them would have missed it.

The first class poem in Holmes’s works is entitled “Bill and Joe,” and

begins thus:

Come, dear old comrades, you and I

Will steal an hour from days gone by,

The shining days when life was new,

And all was bright with morning dew,

The lusty days of long ago,

When you were Bill and I was Joe.

Most of these verses are of sad memories of happy times gone forever:

Where, oh, where are the visions of morning,

Fresh as the dews of our prime?

Gone, like the tenants that quit without warning,

Down the back entry of time.

But some are poems of dear friendship and pleasure at seeing friends

again, like this, called “Indian Summer”:

You’ll believe me, dear boys, ’tis a pleasure to rise,

With a welcome like this in your darling old eyes;

To meet the same smiles and to hear the same tone

Which have greeted me oft in the years that have flown.

One poem entitled “The Boys” is well worth remembering, especially the

last stanzas:

Then here’s to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!

The stars of its winter, the dews of its May!

And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,

Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!

During the times of the great Civil War the poems were mostly of a

patriotic kind. Here, for instance, is the way he opens his poem in

1862, entitled “The Good Ship Union”:

’Tis midnight: through my troubled dream

Loud wails the tempest’s cry;

Before the gale, with tattered sail,

A ship goes plunging by.

What name? Where bound?—The rocks around

Repeat the loud halloo.

—The good ship Union, Southward bound:

God help her and her crew!

In 1878 he wrote a poem on “The Last Survivor,” which opens with these

beautiful lines:

Yes! the vacant chairs tell sadly we are going, going fast,

And the thought comes strangely o’er me, Who will live to be the last?

Let us add one more verse, a humorous verse in which the joker pretends

he’s not so very old:

I don’t think I feel much older; I’m aware I’m rather gray;

But so are many young folks,—I meet ’em every day.

I confess I’m more particular in what I eat and drink,

But one’s taste improves with culture; that is all it means, I think.

_Can you read as once you used to?_ Well, the printing is so bad,

No young folks’ eyes can read it like the books that once we had.

_Are you quite as quick of hearing?_ Please to say that once again.

_Don’t I use plain words, your Reverence?_ Yes, I often use a cane.

...

_Ah, well,—I know—at every age life has a certain charm,—_

_You’re going? Come, permit me, please, I beg you’ll take my arm._

I take your arm! Why take your arm? I’d thank you to be told

I’m old enough to walk alone, but not so _very_ old.

At last, in 1889, the poems stopped, because there were so few of the

class left, and the meetings were so sad. In 1891, Holmes writes to a

friend: “Our old raft of eighteen-twenty-niners is going to pieces; for

the first time no class-meeting is called for the 8th of January. I shall

try to get the poor remnant of the class together at my house; but it

is doubtful whether there is life enough left for a gathering of half a

dozen. I have a very tender feeling to my coevals.”

CHAPTER XI

A FEW STRAY FACTS

In 1858 Holmes moved from his house in Montgomery Place to 21 Charles

street, near the Charles River; and here he was neighbor to Governor

Andrew, the war governor of Massachusetts, and James T. Fields, the

publisher. He afterward occupied another house on Charles street, and

finally, in 1871, moved to Beacon street, where was his home to the end

of his life.

In 1882 he resigned his professorship at Harvard and devoted himself

to literary work, writing, after this, his last book of table talks,

which he called “Over the Teacups.” In 1886 he visited Europe. With

the exception of the journey which he took when a young man studying

medicine, this was his only trip abroad. He was gone only four months,

including the voyage both ways, and spent most of his time in the little

isle of Britain. It seemed as if he disliked being long away from home,

or even away from Boston.

Dr. Holmes was an ingenious man, and had many fads and fancies. He was

the inventor of the small stereoscope for hand use,—such as those used

for looking at photographs. The first one he made himself entirely,

all but the lenses, and he often used to say that he might have made a

fortune out of this invention if he had patented it. Yet, he seems never

to have regretted that he had not done so, thinking perhaps that the

public had been the gainer by his loss.

A life-long hobby of his was photography—beginning in the days when this

art was not so easy and common as it is now. He became a really skillful

artist in it, and made many pictures of the old gambrel-roofed house and

scenes about Harvard College, which have been preserved and may prove

useful to future historians.

Once he thought he could learn to play on the violin. As a matter of

fact, he had no ear for harmony, and could never produce music. Still, he

shut himself up in his study and scraped away hour after hour, for two or

three winters. At the end of that time he could play two or three simple

tunes so that they could be recognized; then he gave it up and never

played any more.

One of his fads was the measuring of large trees. When he traveled

about the country he always had a measuring tape in his pocket, and

this he would stretch around the trunk of every big tree he saw.

When he went to England he pulled out his bit of string to see if

the giant trees of Old England were as big as the giant trees of New

England. He tells with what bated breath and beating, fearful heart

he measured one tree in particular in England with a string on which

he had measured off the trunk of another big tree in America. “Twenty

feet, and a long piece of string left!” he exclaims, when telling of

it. “Twenty-one feet—twenty-two—twenty-three,—an extra heart-beat or

two,—twenty-four—twenty-five, and six inches over!!”

He finally became so noted as an authority on big trees that he was

consulted even by the famous botanist, Professor Asa Gray.

In “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” you may read of a slice of a

hemlock tree, going straight to the center, and showing three hundred

and forty-two rings, each ring representing a year of life. Holmes

really had this tree section, and spent much time sticking pins in at

the various rings, each pin tagged with the date of some event that was

taking place when the ring was forming.

We have already spoken of his love for old books. In the “Autocrat”

he says: “I like books—I was born and bred among them, and have the

easy feelings, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has

among horses. I don’t think I undervalue them, either as companions or

instructors.” He was not only an expert in judging an old and beautiful

book, but he understood the art of bookbinding, and sometimes practiced

it. Here is a sentence of his about books that we should all remember:

“Some books are edifices, to stand as they are built; some are hewn

stones, ready to form a part of future edifices; some are quarries, from

which stones are to be split for shaping and after use.”

Any one who has read the stirring ballad of “Old Blue,” entitled “How

the Old Horse Won the Bet,” will guess that Holmes knew something about

horse-racing. What could be more vivid than this:

“Go!”—Through his ears the summons stung

As if a battle-trump had rung;

The slumbering instincts long unstirred

Started at the old familiar word;

It thrills like flame through every limb,—

What means his twenty years to him?

The savage blow his rider dealt

Fell on his hollow flanks unfelt;

The spur that pricked his staring hide

Unheeded tore his bleeding side;

Alike to him are spur and rein,—

He steps a five-year-old again!

One of his most cherished memories was that of seeing the famous steed

Plenipotentiary win the Derby; this was when Holmes was in England as a

young man; and indeed he knew “a neat, snug hoof, a delicate pastern,

a broad haunch, a deep chest, a close ribbed-up barrel, as well as any

other man in the town.”

Besides these things, he was fond of boxing, of boating, and other forms

of sport; and he knew the fine points about all of these manly pastimes.

You must not think, however, that Holmes was not a hard worker and

a careful student. He wrote easily and freely, but revised with the

greatest care; and he prepared his college lectures over every year,

keeping them up to date while he was constantly studying and reading and

learning new things about his profession.

CHAPTER XII

THE END COMES

The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes flowed like a placid river, with

scarcely a ripple upon its surface. He was born and grew up and passed

all his life near that “hub” he has made so famous, surrounded by throngs

of friends, never visited by sorrow, always fortunate, always happy.

He found amusement in everything, for he looked on the bright side of

life and turned everything into humor. And at last he died, painlessly,

serenely, sitting in his chair, having been up and about to the very

last day. This final event—we cannot call it sad—occurred October 7,

1894. He was eighty-five years old.

We cannot better close this study of Americas most genial poet-humorist

than by quoting the following appreciative and most touching lines from

an English journal:

“THE AUTOCRAT”

“The Last Leaf!” Can it be true,

We have turned it, and on you,

Friend of all?

That the years at last have power?

That life’s foliage and its flower

Fade and fall?

Was there one who ever took

From its shelf, by chance, a book

Penned by you,

But was fast your friend for life,

With one refuge from its strife

Safe and true?

...

From the Boston breakfast table

Wit and wisdom, fun and fable,

Radiated

Through all English-speaking places

When were science and the Graces

So well mated?

Of sweet singers the most sane,

Of keen wits the most humane,

Wide, yet clear.

Like the blue, above us bent,

Giving sense and sentiment

Each its sphere;

With a manly breadth of soul,

And a fancy quaint and droll,

Ripe and mellow;

With a virile power of “hit,”

Finished scholar, poet, wit,

And good fellow!

Years your spirit could not tame,

And they will not dim your fame;

England joys

In your songs, all strength and ease,

And the “dreams” you “wrote to please

Gray-haired boys.”

—_London Punch._

[Illustration]