AMESBURY.
After the sacking and burning of the office of the _Pennsylvania
Freeman_, Whittier returned to Haverhill, and soon after (in 1840) he
sold the old farm and removed with his mother to Amesbury, a small town
some nine miles nearer the sea than Haverhill. It is a rural town of
over three thousand inhabitants, and contains nothing of note except the
poet Whittier. The business of the place is the manufacture of woollen
and cotton goods, and of carriages. The landscape is rugged and
picturesque. The town covers a sloping hillside that stretches down to
the Merrimack. Across this river rises a high hill, crowned with
orchards and meadows. In summer time a sweet and quiet air reigns in the
place. There are old vine-covered houses, grassy lawns, cool crofts, and
sunken orchards; bees are humming, birds singing, and here and there
through the trees slender columns of blue wood-smoke float upward in
airy evanescence. Mr. Whittier's residence is on Friend Street, and not
far beyond, on the same street, or rather in the delta formed by the
meeting of two streets, stands the Friends' Meeting-House, where the
poet has been an attendant nearly all his life:--
"For thee, the priestly rite and prayer,
And holy day, and solemn psalm;
For me, the silent reverence where
My brethren gather, slow and calm."
This old meeting-house is alluded to by the poet in "Abram Morrison," a
fine humorous poem published in "The King's Missive" (1881). We there
read how--
"On calm and fair First Days
Rattled down our one-horse chaise
Through the blossomed apple-boughs
To the old, brown meeting-house."
Whittier's house is a plain, white-painted structure, standing at the
corner of two streets, and having in front of it numerous forest trees,
chiefly maple. Since 1876 the poet has passed only a part of each year
at Amesbury, his other home being Oak Knoll in Danvers, where he resides
with distant relatives.
[Illustration: THE WHITTIER HOUSE, AMESBURY, MASS.]
* * * * *
The study at Amesbury of course possesses great interest for us as the
place where most of the poet's finest lyrics have been written. It is a
very cosey little study, and is entered by one door from within and
another from without. The upper half of the outer door is of glass. This
door is at the end of the left-hand porch shown in the view on page 125.
The two windows in the study look out upon a long strip of yard in the
rear of the house,--very pretty and quiet, and filled with pear-trees
and other trees and vines. Upon one side of the room are shelves holding
five or six hundred well-used volumes. Among them are to be noticed
Charles Reade's novels and the poems of Robert Browning. A side-shelf is
completely filled with a small blue and gold edition of the poets. On
the walls hang oil paintings of views on the Merrimack River and other
Essex County scenes, including Mr. Whittier's birthplace. In one corner
is a handsome writing-desk, littered with papers and letters. Upon the
hearth of the Franklin stove, high andirons smile a fireside welcome
from their burnished brass knobs. Indeed, everything in the room is as
neat and cosey as the wax cell of a honey-bee. And over all is shed the
genial glow of the gentlest, tenderest nature in all the land.
* * * * *
In the autumn of 1844 was written "The Stranger in Lowell," a series of
light sketches suggested by personal experiences. The style of these
essays reminds one of that of "Twice Told Tales," but it is not so pure.
The thought is developed too rhetorically, and the essays betray the
limitations attending the life of a recluse. But these sketches are
interesting as exhibitions of the growth of the author toward this
peculiar form of essay-writing, and are valuable on that account.
* * * * *
In 1847 James G. Birney's anti-slavery paper, _The Philanthropist_,
published in Cincinnati, was merged with the _National Era_, of
Washington, D. C., with Dr. Gamaliel Bailey as managing editor, and
John G. Whittier as associate or corresponding editor. Dr. Bailey had
previously helped edit _The Philanthropist_. Both papers were treated to
mobocratic attacks. The _Era_ became an important organ of the Abolition
party in Washington. To it Mr. Whittier contributed his "Old Portraits
and Modern Sketches" as well as other reform papers.
* * * * *
In the same year (1847) our author published his "Supernaturalism of New
England." [New York and London: Wiley and Putnam.] This pleasant little
volume shows a marked advance upon Whittier's previous prose work. In
its nine chapters he has preserved a number of oral legends and
interesting superstitions of the farmer-folk of the Merrimack region.
Parts of the work have been quoted elsewhere in this volume. One of the
chapters closes with the following fine passage:--
"The witches of Father Baxter and 'the Black Man' of Cotton Mather
have vanished; belief in them is no longer possible on the part of
sane men. But this mysterious universe, through which, half veiled
in its own shadow, our dim little planet is wheeling, with its
star-worlds and thought-wearying spaces, remains. Nature's mighty
miracle is still over and around us; and hence awe, wonder, and
reverence remain to be the inheritance of humanity: still are there
beautiful repentances and holy death-beds, and still over the
soul's darkness and confusion rises star-like the great idea of
duty. By higher and better influences than the poor spectres of
superstition man must henceforth be taught to reverence the
Invisible, and, in the consciousness of his own weakness and sin
and sorrow, to lean with childlike trust on the wisdom and mercy of
an overruling Providence."
In 1849 Mr. Whittier collected and published his anti-slavery poems,
under the title "Voices of Freedom." The year 1850 marks a new era in
his poetical career. He published at that time his "Songs of Labor,"--a
volume which showed that his mind had become calmed by time, and was now
capable of interesting itself in other than reform subjects.
There is not much of outward incident and circumstance to record of the
quiet poetical years passed since 1840 at Amesbury and Danvers. Almost
every year or two a new volume of poems has been issued, each one
establishing on a firmer foundation the Quaker Poet's reputation as a
creator of sweet and melodious lyrical poetry.
In 1868 an institution called "Whittier College" was opened at Salem,
Henry County, Iowa. It was founded in honor of the poet, and is
conducted in accordance with the principles of the Society of Friends.
In 1871 Whittier edited "Child-Life: A Collection of Poems," by various
home and foreign authors. In the same year he edited, with a long
introduction, the "Journal of John Woolman."
The name John Woolman is not widely known to persons of the present
generation; and yet, as Whittier says, it was this humble Quaker
reformer of New Jersey who did more than any one else to inspire all the
great modern movements for the emancipation of slaves, first in the West
Indies, then in the United States, and in Russia. Warner Mifflin, Jean
Pierre Brissot, Thomas Clarkson, Stephen Grellet, William Allen, and
Benjamin Lundy,--all these philanthropists owed much of their impulse to
labor for the freedom of the slave to humble John Woolman. His journal
or autobiography was highly praised by Charles Lamb, Edward Irving,
Crabb Robinson, and others. "The style is that of a man unlettered, but
with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of
whose heart enters into his language."
Woolman was born in Northampton, West Jersey, in 1720. One day, in the
year 1742, while clerk in a store in the village of Mount Holly,
township of Northampton, N. J., he was asked by his employer to make out
the bill of sale of a negro. He drew up the instrument, but his
conscience was awakened, and some years after he began his life-work as
a pedestrian anti-slavery preacher. He refused to ride in, or have
letters sent him by, the stage-coaches, because of the cruelty exercised
toward the horses by the drivers. Neither would he accept hospitality
from those who kept slaves, always paying either the owners or the
slaves for his entertainment. Woolman was most gentle and kind in his
appeals to slave-owners, and rarely met with any violent remonstrance.
Much of his work was within the limits of his own sect, and Mr.
Whittier's introduction gives a valuable and succinct historical
_resume_ of the steps taken by the Friends to rid their sect of the
stigma of slaveholding.
Mount Holly, in Woolman's day, says Whittier, "was almost entirely a
settlement of Friends. A very few of the old houses with their quaint
stoops or porches are left. That occupied by John Woolman was a small,
plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each story in front, a
four-barred fence enclosing the grounds, with the trees he planted and
loved to cultivate. The house was not painted, but whitewashed. The name
of the place is derived from the highest hill in the county, rising two
hundred feet above the sea, and commanding a view of a rich and level
country of cleared farms and woodlands."
Very amusing is the picture given by Mr. Whittier of the eccentric
Benjamin Lay, once a member of the Society of Friends in England, and
afterward an inhabitant for some time of the West Indies, whence he was
driven away on account of the violence and extravagance of his
denunciations of slavery. He was a contemporary of Woolman. He lived in
a cave near Philadelphia, as a sort of Jonah or Elijah, prophesying woe
against the city on account of its participation in the crime of
slavery. He wore clothes made of vegetable fibre, and ate only vegetable
food. "Issuing from his cave, on his mission of preaching 'deliverance
to the captive,' he was in the habit of visiting the various meetings
for worship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to
their disgust and indignation. On one occasion he entered the Market
Street Meeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out.
A burly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate and
thrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of the
street. There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystanders
that he did not feel free to rise himself. 'Let those who cast me here
raise me up. It is their business, not mine.'
"His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentric
life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunch-backed, with
projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a
huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn
eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy
semicircle of beard falling low on his breast,--a figure to recall the
old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold. Such was the irrepressible
prophet who troubled the Israel of slaveholding Quakerism, clinging like
a rough chestnut-burr to the skirts of its respectability, and settling
like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.
"On one occasion, while the annual meeting was in session at Burlington,
N. J., in the midst of the solemn silence of the great assembly, the
unwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat,
was seen passing up the aisle. Stopping midway, he exclaimed, 'You
slaveholders! Why don't you throw off your Quaker coats as I do mine,
and show yourselves as you are?' Casting off as he spoke his outer
garment, he disclosed to the astonished assembly a military coat
underneath, and a sword dangling at his heels. Holding in one hand a
large book, he drew his sword with the other. 'In the sight of God,' he
cried, 'you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, as
I do this book!' suiting the action to the word, and piercing a small
bladder filled with the juice of poke-weed (_phytolacca decandra_),
which he had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh
blood those who sat near him."
There is something overwhelmingly ludicrous about this bladder of
poke-weed juice! And what a subject for a painter!--the portentous,
white-bearded dwarf standing there in the midst of the church, in act to
plunge his gigantic sword tragically into the innermost bowels of the
crimson poke-juice bladder, and from all parts of the house the
converging looks of the broad-brimmed and shovel-bonneted Quakers!
Mr. Whittier further says that "Lay was well acquainted with Dr.
Franklin, who sometimes visited him. Among other schemes of reform he
entertained the idea of converting all mankind to Christianity. This was
to be done by three witnesses,--himself, Michael Lovell, and Abel Noble,
assisted by Dr. Franklin. But, on their first meeting at the doctor's
house, the three 'chosen vessels' got into a violent controversy on
points of doctrine, and separated in ill-humor. The philosopher, who had
been an amused listener, advised the three sages to give up the project
of converting the world until they had learned to tolerate each other."
* * * * *
In 1873 Mr. Whittier edited "Child-Life in Prose." It is a collection of
pretty stories, chiefly about the childhood of various eminent persons.
One of the stories is by the editor, and is about "A Fish that I Didn't
Catch."
In 1875 appeared "Songs of Three Centuries." The poet's design in this
work was (to use his own words) "to gather up in a comparatively small
volume, easily accessible to all classes of readers, the wisest
thoughts, rarest fancies, and devoutest hymns of the metrical authors of
the last three centuries." He says, "The selections I have made
indicate, in a general way, my preferences." It is a choice collection,
rich in lyrical masterpieces.