Shortly before the marriage of his niece Lizzie to Mr. Pickard in the
April of 1876, Whittier in a letter to Mrs. F----, expressing pleasure
at hearing from her and sending her the requested autographs, announced:
“I am not going to give up my residence in Amesbury. But I expect to
spend some time with my cousins at their delightful home, Oak Knoll,
in Danvers. Lizzie sends love. She is busy with her preparations for a
change of base.”
Soon after her marriage he said in a letter from Oak Knoll to his old
friend, M---- C----:
“I have felt rather lonesome since, but am pretty sure it is all for
the best.... I went to Boston to the Convention to choose delegates
to Cincinnati a week ago yesterday. We elected the men I wanted. The
next day I came out here, and found violets and anemones and bloodroot
in bloom and the lawn green with grass. Day before yesterday I spent
with the Sewalls at Melrose to meet Mrs. Pitman and Mrs. Childs. I
had a delightful time. I am now suffering with a cold brought on by
the bitter east wind. I long for the south-east ones. M---- P---- [a
niece] is quite ill; I fear, seriously. Joseph and Gertrude Cartland
are still at Amesbury, and probably thee will find them there when thee
return, which I hope will be ere long.”
A letter from Whittier to the writer in the April of 1881--an extract
from which Mr. Pickard published in his biography of the poet--says:
“I have just got thy pleasant letter. I am afraid I cannot answer it
very well for I am under the baleful influence of our reluctant and
baffling New England spring and my head is in no condition to think.
I was at Amesbury nearly a month, most of the time seeing nobody and
rather glad of it, as I was overdone with folks at Boston.
“I quite agree with what thee say of ‘The Little Pilgrim’ and the life
beyond generally. But I like ‘The Little Pilgrim’ story better than
Dante’s pictures of Heaven--an old man sitting eternally on a high
chair and concentric circling saints, martyrs, and ordinary church
members whirling around him in perpetual gyration and singing ‘glory!’
Ah me! It is idle to speculate on these things. All I ask for is to be
free from sin and to meet the dear ones again.... I am not able to do
much--even reading is often painful; but the east winds will soon blow
themselves out, and I shall feel better, I trust.”
In another letter he says:
“I have just sent a poem to the ‘Atlantic’ which perhaps nobody will
like. But I do and that is enough, as I wrote it to free my mind.” The
poem was “Rabbi Ishmael.”
* * * * *
In 1880 in a letter from Oak Knoll to the writer, he says: “I wonder
whether you are enough in the country at Au--to see the progress of
spring in grass and bud and blossom. Have you birds about you? Here we
have a good many. Last night a pretty rabbit came up under our windows
and the gray squirrels are plenty. I have been hoping to get out to
see you; but if I cannot, you must come here. Two of our folks are in
California this spring.”
* * * * *
Of all the birds he speaks in his letters most of the bluebirds, those
messengers of spring. In a letter in 1881, he says: “The winter has
been rather hard on me and I have suffered from the inability to get
out of doors much. I shall be glad to hear the bluebirds.” At another
time, “The bluebirds are singing in our pines.” And again, “The bad
weather has made me ill; and I shall not try Boston again until the
bluebirds come.” Still again, “The weather now looks like spring. A
bluebird sang today on our grounds.”
In the April of 1884 he wrote from Oak Knoll:
“I hoped to be in Boston at this time but I hardly feel strong enough
to go away at present. Somehow the long, dark winter and spring have
been rather hard upon me. Today I am rejoicing in the sunshine and hope
it has come to stay. Unlike Lowell in his ‘Bigelow Papers,’ I don’t
‘... like our springs
That kind o’ haggle with their greens and things.’
But I believe other places are no better than New England this season.
Letters from Florida, Carolina, and New Jersey all complain of the
cheerless weather. Lizzie [his niece] has been for some weeks at
Statesville, N. C., but is probably now on her way home. A part of the
time the water froze in the pitcher in spite of a fire on the hearth.
Then warmer weather with awful thunder-showers and hail stones three
inches in diameter and mud so deep that she could not ride out. I shall
be at Amesbury most of May, probably.”
* * * * *
It is worth while to realize how frail he was, that we may realize
better how wonderful was the work he accomplished. Any man might well
be thankful that it had been given him to help to carry through one
reform--that of helping to give freedom to the slave.
But Whittier did not stop there. He had been so faithful in one mission
that, as reward, another was given to him, in a sense, along the same
lines, yet on a spiritual plane. In following the footsteps of his
Master, he was still a disciple of freedom. Having known sorrow, he was
taught how to comfort; he spoke to souls in prison and led them forth
into the clearer air and sunlight. Neither health, nor strength, nor
wealth, nor happiness, as the world counts these things, did Whittier
require for his work. He leaves without excuse those who shrink from a
lesser mission. Yet for them he himself would be the first to find a
plea.
* * * * *
In the August of 1879 he wrote: “I am half sick and must try some
change. I may go to New Hampshire in a few days if I feel able.”
* * * * *
In the June of another year, in a letter from Intervale, he says:
“I came up here hoping to find strength in this region of mountains.
But I cannot say that I have succeeded as yet. The Intervale House on
the whole I like much better than the house at North Conway village.
Mount Washington shows to best advantage here and the thick pine woods
near are a comfort. There are but few people here yet; it has been too
cold. The snow lies white on Washington. I expect Joseph and Gertrude
Cartland this week. I do not know how long I shall remain here. Lizzie,
who is still ill, is at Fryeburg only twelve miles from here.”
* * * * *
The pines mentioned in this letter from Intervale were almost adjoining
the hotel there--magnificent trees, old enough for the Indians to have
loved and left in their beauty. They are the entrance to woods so
extensive and so dense that one day the poet, perceiving that a member
of his party who had been sitting under a huge pine tree had vanished,
came hurrying, breathless, up the slope to give warning not to go into
the woods, as there was real danger of being lost in them.
The visit to Intervale to which he refers, and, later, that to
Fryeburg, was during the summer of President Garfield’s illness. Those
who saw the poet then will never forget his indignation and his sorrow
over the martyred and suffering hero, nor the depth of his sympathy
which rendered Whittier himself well-nigh ill.
* * * * *
After this time he wrote:
“I was foolish enough to take cold some five weeks ago and have not got
over it yet. The season, so damp, so hot and cold by turns, has been
a hard one for invalids, and, added to this, the depressing influence
of the good President’s suffering and death. I think with thee that the
death of the President is uniting the nation. God is overruling all for
good.... I often think of our visits to the pines at Intervale and our
ride up to Dr. Buzzell’s hill in Fryeburg.”
This drive was through a beautiful country, a portion of the way,
however, winding through what must have been a magnificent forest
before the fire fiend swept over the giants of the wood and left
blackened stumps and great trunks of trees leafless and well-nigh
branchless, pointing their blasted tops to the sky like arms uplifted
to call down pity and help. But for all these ghosts of former days,
the drive in the summer sunshine was a delightful experience, with
summer foliage for a good part of the way, with hills at hand and the
distant mountains.
The “Joseph and Gertrude” of whom the poet so often speaks in his
letters were Mr. and Mrs. Cartland, both his cousins. They had spent
the winter preceding his niece’s marriage with him in Amesbury. And
during the latest years of his life he passed weeks and months at
their home in Newburyport. They were frequently, perhaps always in
later years, with him in his summerings among the hills. At one time
principals of the Friends School in Providence, they were delightful
in manners and conversation, their culture from books and social life
mingling with their Quaker demureness, and, flashing through this, a
brightness all their own. It was interesting to watch that likeness in
unlikeness between Mr. Cartland and the poet, although, oddly enough,
it was the former who recalled the poet, and never the poet him.
Jettie M---- for whom he wrote “The Henchman” and for whom the boat of
his poem, “Voyage of the Jettie,” was named, was sometimes one of his
summer companions among the hills.