Part 17 (1/2)
The day was still and soft, and the veiled sun was declining as the solemn procession, bearing flowers, followed to the sacred place. At a respectful distance above stood a wide ring of interested observers, but only those who knew her and loved her best drew near. After all was done, and the body was at rest upon the fragrant bed prepared for it, the young flower-bearers brought their burdens to cover her. The bright, tear-stained faces of those who held up their arms full of flowers to be heaped upon the spot until it became a mound of blossoms, allied the scene, in beauty and simplicity, to the solemn rites of antiquity.
It was indeed a poet's burial, but it was far more than that: it was the celebration of the pa.s.sing of a large and beneficent soul.
WHITTIER. NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND HIS FRIENDs.h.i.+PS
BORN DECEMBER 17, 1807; DIED SEPTEMBER 7, 1892
The figure of the Quaker poet, as he stood before the world, was unlike that of any other prominent figure which has walked across the stage of life. This may be said, of course, of every individual; yet the likenesses between men of a given era, or between modern men of strong character and those of the ancient world, cause us sometimes to exclaim with wonder at the evident repet.i.tions in development. One can hardly walk through the galleries of antique statues, nor read the pa.s.sages of Plutarch or Thucydides, without finding this idea thrust upon the mind. But with regard to Whittier, such comparisons were never made, even in fancy. His lithe, upright form, full of quick movement, his burning eye, his keen wit, bore witness to a contrast in himself with the staid, controlled manner and the habit of the sect into which he was born. The love and devotion with which he adhered to the Quaker Church and doctrines served to accentuate his unlikeness to the men of his time, because he early became also one of the most determined contestants in one of the sternest combats which the world has witnessed.
Neither in the ranks of poets nor divines nor philosophers do we find his counterpart. He felt a certain brotherhood with Robert Burns, and early loved his genius; but where were two more unlike? A kind of solitude of life and experience, greater than that which usually throws its shadow on the human soul, invested him in his pa.s.sage through the world. The refinement of his education, the calm of nature by which, in youth, he was surrounded, the few books which he made his own, nearly all serious in their character, and the religious atmosphere in which he was nurtured, all tended to form an environment in which knowledge developed into wisdom, and the fiery soul formed a power to restrain or to express its force for the good of humanity.
But as surely as he was a Quaker, so surely also did he feel himself a part of the life of New England. He believed in the ideals of his time; the simple ways of living; the eager nouris.h.i.+ng of all good things by the sacrifice of many private wishes; in short, he made one cause with Garrison and Phillips, Emerson and Lowell, Longfellow and Holmes. His standards were often different from those of his friends, but their ideals were on the whole made in common.
His friends were to Whittier, more than to most men, an unfailing source of daily happiness and grat.i.tude. With the advance of years, and the death of his unmarried sister, his friends became all in all to him. They were his mother, his sister, and his brother; but in a certain sense they were always friends of the imagination. He saw some of them only at rare intervals, and sustained his relations with them chiefly in his hurried correspondence. He never suffered himself to complain of what they were not; but what they were, in loyalty to chosen aims, and in their affection for him, was an unending source of pleasure. With the shortcomings of others he dealt gently, having too many shortcomings of his own, as he was accustomed to say, with true humility. He did not, however, look upon the failings of his friends with indifferent eyes. ”How strange it is!” he once said. ”We see those whom we love going to the very verge of the precipice of self-destruction, yet it is not in our power to hold them back!”
A life of invalidism made consecutive labor of any kind an impossibility. For years he was only able to write for half an hour or less, without stopping to rest, and these precious moments were devoted to some poem or other work for the press, which was almost his only source of income. His correspondence suffered, from a literary point of view; but his letters were none the less delightful to his friends. To the world of literature they are perhaps less important than those of most men who have achieved a high place.
Whittier was between twenty and thirty years of age when his family left the little farm near Haverhill, where he was born, and moved into the town of Amesbury, eight miles distant. Long before that period he had identified himself with the antislavery cause, and had visited, in the course of his ceaseless labors for the slaves, New York, Philadelphia, and Was.h.i.+ngton. These brief journeys bounded his travels in this world.
In the year 1843 he wrote anxiously to his publisher, Mr. Fields, ”I send with this 'The Exiles,' a kind of John Gilpin legend. I am in doubt about it. Read it, and decide for thyself whether it is worth printing.”
He began at this rather late period (he was then thirty-six years old) to feel a touch of satisfaction in his comparatively new occupation of writing poetry, and to speak of it without reserve to his chosen friends. His poems were then beginning to bring him into personal relation with the reading world. Many years later, when speaking of the newspaper writing which absorbed his earlier life, he said that he had written a vast amount for the press; he thought that his work would fill nearly ten octavo volumes; but he had grown utterly weary of throwing so much out into s.p.a.ce from which no response ever came back to him. At length he decided to put it all aside, discovering that a power lay in him for more congenial labors.
From the moment of the publication of his second volume of poems, Whittier felt himself fairly launched upon a new career, and seemed to stand with a responsive audience before him. The poems ”Toussaint L'Ouverture,” ”The Slave-s.h.i.+ps,” and others belonging to the same period, followed in quick succession. Sometimes they took the form of appeal, sometimes of sympathy, and again they are prophetic or dramatic. He hears the slave mother weep:--
”Gone--gone--sold and gone To the rice-swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters-- Woe is me, my stolen daughters!”
Such voices could not be silenced. Though men might turn away and refuse to read or to listen, the music once uttered rang out into the common air, and would not die.
A homely native wit pointed Whittier's familiar correspondence.
Writing in 1849, while revising his volume for publication, he speaks of one of his poems as ”that rascally old ballad 'Kathleen,'” and adds that it ”wants something, though it is already too long.” He adds: ”The weather this morning is cold enough for an Esquimau purgatory-- terrible. What did the old Pilgrims mean by coming here?”
With the years his friends.h.i.+p with his publisher became more intimate.
In writing him he often indulged his humor for fun and banter: ”Bachelor as I am, I congratulate thee on thy escape from single (misery!) blessedness. It is the very wisest thing thee ever did. Were I autocrat, I would see to it that every young man over twenty-five and every young woman over twenty was married without delay. Perhaps, on second thought, it might be well to keep one old maid and one old bachelor in each town, by way of warning, just as the Spartans did their drunken helots.”
Discussing the question of some of his ”bad rhymes,” and what to do about them, he wrote once: ”I heartily thank thee for thy suggestions.
Let me have more of them. I had a hearty laugh at thy hint of the 'carnal' bearing of one of my lines. It is now simply _rural._ I might have made some other needful changes had I not been suffering with headache all day.”
Occasionally the fire which burned in him would flame out, as when he writes in 1851: ”So your Union-tinkers have really caught a 'n.i.g.g.e.r'
at last! A very pretty and refres.h.i.+ng sight it must have been to Sabbath-going Christians yesterday--that _chained_ court-house of yours. And Bunker Hill Monument looking down upon all! But the matter is too sad for irony. G.o.d forgive the miserable politicians who gamble for office with dice loaded with human hearts!”
From time to time, also, we find him expressing his literary opinions eagerly and simply as friend may talk with friend, and without aspiring to literary judgment. ”Th.o.r.eau's 'Walden' is capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs.”
It would be unjust to Whittier to quote this talk on paper as his final opinion upon Th.o.r.eau, for he afterwards read everything he wrote, and was a warm appreciator of his work.
His enthusiasm for books and for the writers of books never faded.
”What do we not all owe you,” he writes Mr. Fields, ”for your edition of De Tocqueville! It is one of the best books of the century. Thanks, too, for Allingham's poems. After Tennyson, he is my favorite among modern British poets.”