The years are many, the years are old,
My dreams are over, my songs are sung,
But, out of a heart that has not grown cold,
I bid God-speed to the fair and young.
Would that my prayer were even such
As the righteous pray availing much,
But nothing save good can Love befall,
And naught is lacking since Love is all,
Thy one great blessing of life the best,
Like the rod of Moses swallows the rest!
(Signed) JOHN G. WHITTIER.
Oak Knoll, 6th mo. 7, 1878.
Later he describes himself as listening to the "Life of Mrs. Stowe."
"It is a satisfying book, a model biography, or, rather, autobiography
for dear Mrs. Stowe speaks all through it. Dr. Holmes's letters reveal
him as he is--wise, generous, chivalrous. Witness the kindliness and
delicate sympathy of his letters during the Lord Byron trouble....
Miss W. has read us some of Howells's 'Hazard of New Fortunes.' It
strikes me that it is a strong book. That indomitable old German,
Linden--that saint of the rather godless sect of dynamiters and
anarchists--is a grand figure; one can't help loving him."
The poet's notes and letters are full of passages showing how closely
he followed public affairs. "If I were not sick, and to-morrow were
not election day," he says, "I should go to Boston. I hope to be there
in a few days, at any rate. You must 'vote early and often,' and elect
Hooper. Here we are having Marryat's triangular duel acted over by our
three candidates. I wish they were all carpet-bagging among the
Kukluxes. It wouldn't hurt us to go without a representative until we
can raise one of our own." ...
And again: "I am somewhat disappointed by the vote on the suffrage
question. It should be a lesson to us not to trust to political
platforms. A great many Republicans declined to vote for it or against
it. They thought the leaders of the suffrage movement had thrown
themselves into the hands of Butler and the Democrats. However, it is
only one of those set-backs which all reforms must have--temporary,
but rather discouraging.
"I worked hard in our town, and we made a gain of nearly one hundred
votes over last year."
"I am happy," he says later, "in the result of the election--thankful
that the State has sat down heavily on ----. I never thought of taking
an active interest in politics this year, but I could not help it when
the fight began."
And still later in life: "I am glad of the grand overturn in Boston,
and the courage of the women voters. How did it seem to elbow thy way
to the polls through throngs of men folk?"
Whittier never relinquished his house at Amesbury, where his kind
friends, Judge Cate and his wife, always made him feel at home. As the
end of his life drew near, it was easy to see that the village home
where his mother and his sister lived and died was the place he
chiefly loved; but he was more inaccessible to his friends in
Amesbury, and the interruptions of a fast-growing factory town were
sometimes less agreeable to him than the country life at Oak Knoll. He
was a great disbeliever in too much solitude, however, and used to
say, "The necessary solitude of the human soul is enough; it is
surprising how great that is."
Once only he expresses this preference for the dear old village home
in his letters. "I have been at Amesbury for a fortnight. Somehow I
seem nearer to my mother and sister; the very walls of the rooms seem
to have become sensitive to the photographs of unseen presences."
As the end drew near, he passed more and more time with his beloved
cousins Gertrude and Joseph Cartland in Newburyport, whose interests
and aims in life were so close to his own.
The habit of going to the White Mountains in their company for a few
weeks during the heat of summer was a fixed one. He grew to love
Asquam, with its hills and lakes, almost better than any other place
for this sojourn. It was there he loved to beckon his friends to join
him. "Do come, if possible," he would write. "The years speed on; it
will soon be too late. I long to look on your dear faces once more."
His deafness began to preclude general conversation; but he delighted
in getting off under the pine-trees in the warm afternoons, or into a
quiet room upstairs at twilight, and talking until bedtime. He
described to us, during one visit, his first stay among the hills. His
parents took him where he could see the great wooded slope of
Agamenticus. As he looked up and gazed with awe at the solemn sight, a
cloud drooped, and hung suspended as it were from one point, and
filled his soul with astonishment. He had never forgotten it. He said
nothing at the time, but this cloud hanging from the breast of the
hill filled his boyish mind with a mighty wonder, which had never
faded away.
Notwithstanding his strong feeling for Amesbury, and his presence
there always at "quarterly meeting," he found himself increasingly
comfortable in the companionship of his devoted relatives. Something
nearer "picturesqueness" and "the beautiful" came to please the sense
and to soothe the spirit at Oak Knoll. He did not often make record in
his letters of these things; but once he speaks charmingly of the
young girl in a red cloak, on horseback, with the dog at her side,
scampering over the lawn and brushing under the sloping branches of
the trees. The sunset of his life burned slowly down; and in spite of
illness and loss of power, he possessed his soul in patience. After a
period when he usually felt unable to write, he revived and wrote a
letter, in which he spoke as follows of a poem which had been sent for
his revision: "The poem is solemn and tender; it is as if a wind from
the Unseen World blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow is sweeter
than that of gladness--a holy fear mingled with holier hope. For
myself, my hope is always associated with dread, like the shining of a
star through mist. I feel, indeed, that Love is victorious, that there
is no dark it cannot light, no depth it cannot reach; but I imagine
that between the Seen and the Unseen there is a sort of neutral
ground, a land of shadow and mystery, of strange voices and
undistinguished forms. There are some, as Charles Lamb says, 'who
stalk into futurity on stilts,' without awe or self-distrust. But I
can only repeat the words of the poem before me."....
One of the last, perhaps the very last visit he made to his friends in
Boston was in the beautiful autumn weather. The familiar faces he
hoped to find were absent. He arrived without warning, and the very
loveliness of the atmosphere which made it possible for him to travel
had tempted younger people out among the falling leaves. He was
disappointed, and soon after sent these verses to rehearse his
experience:--
"I stood within the vestibule
Whose granite steps I knew so well,
While through the empty rooms the bell
Responded to my eager pull.
"I listened while the bell once more
Rang through the void, deserted hall;
I heard no voice, nor light foot-fall,
And turned me sadly from the door.
"Though fair was Autumn's dreamy day,
And fair the wood-paths carpeted
With fallen leaves of gold and red,
I missed a dearer sight than they.
"I missed the love-transfigured face,
The glad, sweet smile so dear to me,
The clasp of greeting warm and free;
What had the round world in their place?
"O friend, whose generous love has made
My last days best, my good intent
Accept, and let the call I meant
Be with your coming doubly paid."
But even this journey was beyond his strength. He wrote: "Coming back
from Boston in a crowded car, a window was opened just behind me and
another directly opposite, and in consequence I took a bad cold, and
am losing much of this goodly autumnal spectacle. But Oak Knoll woods
were never, I think, so beautiful before."
In future his friends were to seek him; he could go no more to them:
the autumn had indeed set in.
Now began a series of birthday celebrations, which were blessings not
unmixed in his cup of life. He was in the habit of writing a brief
note of remembrance on these anniversaries; in one of which, after
confessing to "a feeling of sadness and loneliness," he turns to the
Emerson Calendar, and says, "I found for the day some lines from his
'World Soul:'--
"'Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old;
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild piled snow-drift
The warm rose-buds blow.'