In the long winter evenings when the poet’s niece was away at boarding
school and storm or some other cause for dearth of visitors had left
him and his housekeeper alone together, and his eyes would not permit
him to read, or, perhaps when he strove to banish care and pain and
the memory of his loss, he would sometimes entertain himself and this
Scotswoman with stories.
The more absurd these were, the better for him. On occasions they
were witch stories, the most horrible New England legends that memory
could recall from his extensive reading and his imagination color with
new vividness. In the telling of them, manner, tone, words--all would
combine to make her flesh creep and her hair stand on end.
At last she would laugh.
Then he would turn upon her with assumed severity. “Margaret, don’t
thee believe it?”
“Did you see it, Mr. Whittier?” she would demand, concerning some
marvellous vision of the unknown upon which he had been dilating.
“No,” he would confess. “But they told me it was so.”
And he would join in her mirth.
To this never failing sense of humor Whittier owned somewhat of the
clearness of his mental outlook, and much of his power of retort.
* * * * *
But there is something infinitely touching in this trying to make
the best of things as he sat by his lonely fireside with the world
applauding him.
* * * * *
In the winter of 1866-67, being detained in Boston by a very severe
snow-storm, he wrote to this same housekeeper: “I’m waiting for proofs
of ‘Tent on the Beach.’ Live sumptuously; patronize the butcher and
baker; and take good care of Charlie [the parrot]; and I’ll be home as
soon as I can.”
On his arrival a few days later he greeted her with: “Well, Margaret,
I’ve been ‘snow bound.’”
“Yes,” she answered him. “I don’t know but you’ll have to write another
‘Snow Bound.’”
Thought carried him to that loved room where there looked down upon him
from the walls the pictured faces of his mother and his sister with,
to his imagination, somewhat of the gaze of the far-away reality. He
answered her with a sadness in his tone that she never forgot. “There’d
be only thee and Charlie and the cat to write about,” he said.
His dear ones were ever the undercurrent of his thoughts. In 1881 he
wrote from Amesbury, “I am here to be at the election on the sixth. I
like to visit Amesbury.... I think sadly of the loss of so many dear
friends.”
“And yet, dear heart, remembering thee,”
he wrote of Elizabeth in “Snow Bound.” That memory, beautiful,
Heavenly, never faded with the years. In his submission to God’s will,
and in his faith, the grief of time grew into the hope of eternity; but
the thought was always there. In 1887 he said in a letter to the writer
who also had lived in Amesbury: “I often think of the old days when thy
father was alive and sister Lizzie and we were all together.” Two years
later--only three years before his own death, he wrote again, “I have
not forgotten the old days in Amesbury.” To those who had known these
he was glad to speak of them.
The Mrs. C---- across the way from his home, whose long years of
friendship with the Whittier family have been spoken of, told the
writer how after the death of his mother and sister, Whittier’s first
act on coming home from an absence was to go into the room in which
hung the portraits of these two, and to stand before them, not only
as if greeting them on his home coming, but as if also receiving their
welcome to a house in which to him their presence always lingered and
made it home as was no other place on earth.
From the day of his sister’s death through all the greater ease of life
which came from his success and his fame, and--far dearer to him than
either--the honor and love which flowed in to him from all sides, he
yet never failed to feel this loss of home.
* * * * *
So strong was this sense of loss that there was a time, a few years
after the passing of Elizabeth, when it seemed as if such memories
would prove too much for him.
In the winter of his early sixties he was stricken with an illness in
which his life hung in the balance. It was no acute disease, but the
vital force in him seemed to have run so low and his recuperative power
to be so little, that for weeks the doctor, who watched over him with
increasing concern, was very anxious as to the outcome.
For it was not medicine or even regimen which was especially needed.
It was most of all lovingness, tenderness, home care that Whittier
required. At that time a touch of home meant life itself to the
home-loving poet who was actually dying of the loneliness of his
hearthstone. That winter his niece, his housekeeper when at home with
him, was at the South teaching the freedmen.
At this crisis his nephew’s wife came from her home in New York and was
with him for months. A trained nurse could not have been more watchful
or more judicious, and no daughter could have been more kind and tender
in her ministrations. The doctor took heart. This brooding over the
poet, this constant, tactful interest in him, this cheerful face and
graceful carriage always in his home--of his own family by marriage
if not by birth--was, as the doctor had foreseen, the one necessity
without which no other help could have availed, but with which all
skill could readily co-operate. Whittier himself never undervalued his
niece’s ministrations, but always said that under Heaven he owed his
life largely to her care.
So, the poet came back from the edge of the Dark Valley where his feet
had been treading. He long outlived the physician who had watched over
him with such solicitude.