“I go to Amesbury this week,” wrote the poet from Oak Knoll in one of
his later years, “to attend our Quarterly Meeting there [the Quarterly
Meeting of the Friends]. “I have not been very well this spring; but
the east winds must be nearly over and I hope I shall feel better.”
“I suppose we all need to feel our weakness and dependence upon our
Father,” he added, in answer to his correspondent, “and that it is well
for us to find ourselves walking the Valley of Humiliation; but I like
the hills and the sunshine, after all.” And the hills and the sunshine
of joy were what he liked to lead others to when he could.
With his invincible diffidence as to his own work, he spoke of “My poem
in the ‘Atlantic,’” deprecating its merit but referring to it as a sad
revelation of “the old time.”
He had written before in the same strain of another of his poems there.
* * * * *
One day there came to him at Oak Knoll a person who had known him long
and well but had recently done something thoughtlessly with which she
afterward perceived that he had reason to be offended. She had come
to him resolved to tell him of it, and believing that, since he was so
kind, this would not be hard to do.
But it was hard; and as after the greeting she sat listening and saying
little, the sense of her own mistake grew upon her. How could she bear
it if he should lose confidence, even in her judgment?
“There is something I have done in regard to you, Mr. Whittier,” she
began at last----“and I’m afraid you’ll be angry with me,” she added
with a new fearfulness.
Instantly, he turned his face from the fire into which he had been
gazing and looked at her. He read all her fears. His whole face
softened. His flashing eyes met hers.
“I shall not be angry long,” he answered; and was silent, waiting.
But the glance, the perfect assurance of the tone were more than
comfort; they were comprehension and the glad evidence of a trust too
firm to be lightly overthrown. And as she told her story, freely now,
it turned out that he had known it, and in a moment by his tact and
judgment had righted everything she had feared that she had tangled.
* * * * *
“I have been unable to write for some weeks except at rare intervals,
as my eyes are failing me, and my general health and strength are so
diminished,” he wrote from Amesbury in the May of 1889. “I never expect
to write again except an occasional note in private correspondence.
The mental effort of dictation which I have tried is too hard for me.
Phebe [the adopted daughter of his cousin, Mrs. Woodman at Oak Knoll]
has tried to be my amanuensis, but to little purpose. I can only read
for a few minutes without pain. I should not venture to engage to write
anything for the public. My work is over--I can do no more, but must
silently wait for the end which cannot be far off. Letter after letter
meanwhile comes to me which I cannot answer, and people come to see me
whom I cannot talk with.”
* * * * *
Yet he rallied his strength. For it was after this letter that the last
beautiful message of his poems--“At Sundown”--printed and not published
at that time, was sent out by him in greeting to his friends.
* * * * *
Whatever his weakness and weariness of body, his prayer,
“Let my last days be my best,”
was answered. For the soul in him was that shining “light that shineth
more and more unto the perfect day.”
After his recovery from “grippe” with which he had been dangerously
ill, the writer held a long conversation with him at the home of his
cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Cartland of Newburyport.
In this conversation he seemed in clearness of vision, wideness of
range, strength and grasp of subject, and especially in a certain
energy, to carry her back to his days of comparative bodily vigor. All
that his soul had had or held, it had and held more firmly than ever,
and it had gained that higher outlook spread before the eyes of him
whose feet are upon the mountains.
Not only did Whittier believe in immortality, but his very presence
helped others to believe in it.