The poet’s well-known fondness for young people was not more marked
in later life than in his Amesbury days. There was a group of these
young people whom he used to call his “boys and girls,” and in whose
achievements and successes he felt the greatest interest. His influence
over them was not due wholly to that in his character which commanded
their admiration, or even to his fun and power of repartee. It came
largely from his sympathy with them, his ability to see things from
their point of view. And who so well as he brimming over with humor and
wit, could enter into and direct their fun? One of this adopted family
has recalled when several of them sat in the garden room, each merrily
declaring what he or she would do with a fortune, if that would only
befall.
“I should put thirty thousand dollars in the bank for John G.
Whittier,” declared the poet promptly--thirty thousand dollars being at
that time a much larger sum than it is today. “And I should buy M----
[the daughter of his married sister and very fond of pretty gowns] ten
new dresses!” And he laughed with his listeners.
* * * * *
To a member of this same group, the one to whom he had given the lilies
on the train, he one day made a prediction. She had told him she was
going to Centre Harbor, then a famous resort.
“Are thee going alone?” he asked her. She was; but she was to meet a
cousin there. “Thee’ll lose thy way,” he said. And when she asserted
that she never did that, he persisted, “Thee’ll lose thy trunk at
Dover.”
And she actually did!
* * * * *
It is to Whittier that Lucy Larcom refers in her poem about the child,
“Pouring out cups of invisible tea,” and says,
“Yonder a poet sits chained at thy feet.”
This was literally true, for the writer coming that day into the
garden room, found him seated on the floor with the baby daughter of a
relative, entertaining his young visitor and being entertained while
Miss Larcom looked on smiling.
* * * * *
To one of these young friends to whom he used to talk of many things in
Heaven and on earth, he once said: “Thy conscience stands in thy way.”
“I don’t see what I can do,” she retorted. “I can’t get rid of it. I
suppose I shall have to let it stand.”
To this he readily assented. His remark may have been a test.
* * * * *
To waken a dormant power, to teach an unfledged thought to take wing
and fly boldly, to turn stray impulses into steady purpose for good,
to stimulate youthful promise to become the worthy performance of
maturity, to break the chains of ignorance and prejudice, as he had
helped to break the iron chains of the slave, was not only delight
to Whittier, it was one of the objects for which he lived. The men
and women who knew him in their youth and who are still living have
rich memories of words fitly spoken by which he opened their eyes to
opportunities hitherto unseen, turned their thoughts into new channels
and stimulated them to nobler performance.
“I like thy courage and perseverance,” he wrote to a young friend
entering the path of literature, “and what thee say of sometime writing
out thy heart as if nobody were to read and comment upon it. I suspect
that is the true way; and there are passages in thy letter which are
better than thee dare to print.”
* * * * *
One of his young friends in whose latent literary powers he had
faith and whom stress of circumstances had brought into financial
difficulties, one day came to see him. Another visitor interrupted
their conversation and Mr. Whittier did not get the opportunity to say
to her what he would have liked to say.
The poet, however, was a man of resources. The way of speech being
blocked, he took the path of suggestion. He made her a gift of some new
pens--“_to try_.”
* * * * *
But the poet who gathered this circle of young people about him,
holding them by the charm of his personality, who said that the way
to keep young was to be with the young, who delighted in youth even
to the last, giving evidence in himself that age is but the youth of
immortality, was yet to youth, as he was to maturity, a leader--his
judgment, not theirs, dominated.
This was the case one autumn day as he sat in the garden room smilingly
listening to the pleadings of a bright and interesting member of that
large family of his “boys and girls.”
She wanted the poet to put his autograph at the bottom of a blank sheet
of paper, that something might be written over it. She most carefully
specified what this was to be. There had been a joke about something
that had taken place in the summer when both had been at the mountains,
and, not herself, but some one else, was to write this page. But she
vouched for exactly what it should be.
Mr. Whittier laughingly turned her from the point. Until at last she
rose to leave. He accompanied her to the door. The writer seems still
to see the girl standing on the doorstep and looking with a laugh,
and yet a coaxing, into the face of the poet as she reiterated her
plea--and to see him from the threshold gazing down upon her, enjoying
the light in her clear brown eyes and the saucy tilt of her head, and
answering with exceeding gravity of tone:
“My name is not worth anything, now that the Eastern Railroad stocks
have gone so low.”
Then both laughed. And the visitor departed--without the autograph.
* * * * *
In Amesbury lived also the “Jettie” at whose challenge that he had
never written a love poem, Whittier wrote “The Henchman.” It was of her
the poet sang:
“To Jettie for her dancing nights,
Slippers dropped from Northern lights.”
Young friends in his own town, and some of them members of his party
in summer places, with their merry young voices and laughter helped
the poet to many a pleasant hour--although it is safe to say that he
always did his share in securing these.
* * * * *
He questioned laughingly a young girl giving an account of a lecture
upon “Chivalry” to which she had just been listening.
“How would thee like,” he said, “to have a knight roaming around the
world doing exploits in thy name?”
She retorted that unless he went to serve his country she would prefer
to have him stay at home. To this he responded at once:
“Thy father [in service of his fellow-men] is a better knight-errant
than any in those days.”
* * * * *
A child of ten years whose home was on the beautiful Merrimac River, a
mile from the poet’s house, one day shyly left her tribute of loving
reverence for him at his door. To her came the following note:
“John G. Whittier is greatly indebted to his young friend, Grace
M----, for her beautiful gift of flowers. It is doubly welcome at this
inclement season and she has his thanks and best wishes. Amesbury, 3rd
mo, 29, 1883.”