“the winding Powow fold
The green hill in its belt of gold.”
He pictures on the banks of the Powow old “Cobbler Keezar” beholding
through his magic lapstone the river, then
“Woodsy and wild and lonesome,”
changed to the day when the mighty forest was “broken by many a
steepled town.”
A stone’s throw from Whittier’s grave still stands the house of
“Goodman Macey,” the hero of the poem, “The Exiles,” which tells his
story. The haunted house in the poem, “The New Wife and the Old,” is
still pointed out in Hampton, although recently it has been removed to
another site, restored and inhabited by other than ghosts. “Margaret
Smith’s Journal,” in his prose writings, takes the reader through the
woods of Newbury giving many a picturesque incident of the life of the
times--and many a touching one. “The Double-Headed Snake” is a legend
of Newbury; “The Bridal of Pennacook” sketches the upper portions of
the Merrimac; “The Swan Song of Parson Avery” sends its singer from the
Newbury shores out beyond the bar and into the great ocean. In his
songs the poet carries us along the Salisbury shore of the river to the
Chain Bridge which crosses it at Deer Island, the home of Mrs. Harriet
Prescott Spofford, his contemporary, herself novelist and poet; thence
up the Newbury shore to that poem of streamlets, the Artichoke, which
slipping beneath the overhanging boughs of trees that all but meet
across it, goes through the old mill race--Curson’s Mill--to join the
Merrimac.
Beyond the woods and the two rivers lies the ocean. “The Tent on the
Beach” describes the long stretch of Salisbury before its invasion,
first by shanties and then by hotels and casinos and cottages,
transformed its picturesque solitudes. But nothing can make less
magnificent the long roll of the incoming surf along its six miles of
almost unbroken reach of sands.
* * * * *
In one of his letters Whittier says:
“The country about here never looked so beautiful as now. We went to
Salisbury pine woods yesterday after meeting. I never saw such perfect
and glorious effects of light and shadow--such perfection of green
earth and blue sky--such grottoes and labyrinths of verdure, barred at
the entrance by solid beams of sunlight, like golden gates. At such
times I wish I were a painter.”
In this same letter the poet gives a touch of home life. “We had a
pleasant visit from Lucy Larcom last week,” he writes. “Brother Frank
was here on sixth day on his way from Boston--will be back tomorrow or
next day. We have had the famous Moncure Conway here. He came over last
week with the Cursons.”
“The Cursons” were two interesting sisters of fine New England
ancestry. The sisters with their mother lived at Curson’s Mills where
the fairy Artichoke flows to meet the Merrimac. It was to these sisters
Whittier’s “Lines after a Summer’s Day’s Excursion” were written:
“Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke
The morning dreams of Artichoke
Along his wooded shore!
Varied as varying Nature’s ways,
Sprites of the river, woodland fays,
Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”
In “Snow Bound” Whittier speaks to his brother as being the only one
of that family group left beside himself. The tie between the brothers
was very close. Many times the poet’s letters refer to this brother,
enjoying him in health, watching over him when ill, and following him
with fadeless love when Franklin passed on before him.
A relative of the Whittiers and at one time in the poet’s family has
spoken to the writer of the brightness and wit of Franklin, himself
also a writer although under an assumed name, and of the brilliant
conversation of the two men as they sat together in the garden room,
their reminiscences and familiar talk interrupted by peals of laughter.
For the poet who showed chiefly his grave side to the world had in him
a rich vein of humor--and his friends and neighbors knew that it never
gave out through want of being worked! Franklin’s daughter, her aunt’s
namesake, lived with the poet from early girlhood until her marriage.
* * * * *
How Whittier loved all that region! But most of all, he sings of the
Merrimac--river worthy of his songs!--of the Merrimac bordering the
town of his birth and of his later home, the river of which he says
“never was it by its valley-born forgotten.” With what delight he
pictures its loveliness from its source among “Winnepesaukee’s hundred
isles, through the green repose of Plymouth meadows, the gleam and
ripple of Campton rills,” to where it flows, “green-tufted, oak-shaded
by Amoskeag’s fall,” and adown its gleaming miles to “Salisbury’s beach
of shining sand.”
Whittier’s Indian poems, except “Mogg Megone” and “Pentucket,” breathe
that note of sadness for the defeated and sorrowing which he always
felt and which his spirit will feel until such defeat and sorrow are
wiped out of the world--the very spirit of his writings and of his life.
“Still thy love, O Christ arisen,
Yearns to reach these souls in prison.”