JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIERJOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIERAT AMESBURY
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
Nearly all the likenesses ofMr.Whittier with which the present public is familiar, represent an aged man, albeit with a fire flashing in the eye and illuminating the countenance, like that fire which underlies the snows of Hecla. But if, after having passed eighty, his face was still so strong and radiant, in his youth it must have had a singular beauty, and he kept until the last that eye of the Black Bachelder, a glint of which was to be seen in the eye of Daniel Webster, and possibly, tradition says, in that of Hawthorne and of Cushing. At any rate, he showed a fair inheritance of the strength of will and purpose of that strange hero of song and romance, his Bachelder ancestor.
But other strains, as interesting as the old preacher’s, are to be found in Whittier’s ancestry. One of his grandmothers was a Greenleaf, whence his second name, and she is said to have been descended from a Huguenot family of the name of Feuillevert, who translated their name on reaching our shores (as the custom still is withmany of our French and Canadian settlers,) to Greenleaf. The poet himself says:
The name the Gallic exile bore,St.Malo, from thy ancient mart,Became upon our western shoreGreenleaf, for Feuillevert.
To the artistic imagination, that likes in everything a reason for its being, there is something satisfactory in the thought of Huguenot blood in Whittier’s veins; and one sees something more than coincidence in the fact that on the Greenleaf coat-of-arms is both a warrior’s helmet and a dove bearing an olive-leaf in its mouth. Among the Greenleafs was one of Cromwell’s Lieutenants; and thus on two sides we find our martial poet born of people who suffered for conscience’ sake, as he himself did for full forty years of his manhood. The scion of such a race—how could he pursue any other path than that which opened before him to smite Armageddon; and yet the grandson of Thomas Whittier, of Haverhill, who refused the protection of the blockhouse, and, faithful to his tenets, had the red man to friend, in the days when the war-whoop heralded massacre to right and left—the grandson of this old Quaker, we say, must have felt some strange stirrings of spirit against spirit, within him, as the man of peace contended with the man of war, and the man of war blew outstrains before which the towers of slavery’s dark fortress fell. For Whittier was not only the trumpeter of the Abolitionists, in those dark but splendid days of fighting positive and tangible wrong: he was the very trumpet itself, and he must have felt sometimes that the breath of the Lord blew through him.
They are terrible days to look back upon, the period of that long, fierce struggle beneath a cloud of obloquy and outrage; but to those who lived in that cloud it was lined with light, and in all our sorrows there was the joy of struggle and of brotherhood, of eloquence and poetry and song, and the greater joy yet of knowing that all the forces of the universe must be fighting on the side of right.
The old homestead where Whittier was born, in 1807, is still standing, and although built more than two hundred years ago, it is in good condition. It is on a high table-land, surrounded by what in the late fall and winter seems a dreary landscape. Carlyle’s Craigenputtock, the Burns cottage, the Whittier homestead, all have a certain correlation, each of them the home of genius and of comparative poverty, and each so bleak and bare as to send the imagination of the dwellers out on strong wings to lovelier scenes. Little boxes and paper-weights are made from the boards of the garret-floor of the Whittier homestead,as they are from the Burns belongings; and twigs of the overshadowing elm are varnished and sold for pen-holders. But the whole house would have to go to the lathe to meet the demand, if it were answered generally, for it is the old farmhouse celebrated by “Snowbound,” our one national idyll, the perfect poem of New England winter life. An allusion to that strange and powerful character, Harriet Livermore, in this poem, has brought down upon the poet’s head the wrath of one of her collateral descendants, who has written a book to prove that nothing which was said of that fantastic being in her lifetime was true, and that so far from quarreling with Lady Hester Stanhope as to which of them was to ride beside the Lord on his reëntry into Jerusalem, she never even saw Lady Hester. But why any one, descendant or otherwise, should take offence at the tender feeling and beauty of the poet’s mention of her is as much a mystery as her life.
It was in the fields about this homestead that fame first found our poet. For there he bought, from the pack of a traveling peddler, the first copy of Burns that he had ever seen, and that snatched him away from hard realities into a land of music; and here the mail-man brought him the copy of that paper containing his earliest poem, one whose subject was the presence ofthe Deity in the still small whisper in the soul; and here Garrison came with the words of praise and found him in the furrow, and began that friendship which Death alone severed, as the two fought shoulder to shoulder in the great fight of the century.
Although he had been for some time contributing to the press,Mr.Whittier was but twenty-three years old when he was thunderstruck by a request to take the place ofMr.George D. Prentice, in editingThe New England Weekly Reviewfor a time; of which request he has said that he could not have been more astonished had he been told he was appointed Prime Minister to the Khan of Tartary. In 1835 and in 1836 he was elected to the State Legislature of Massachusetts, and he was engaged, during all this period, in active politics in a manner that seems totally at variance with the possibilities of the singer of sweet songs as we know him to-day. He declined reëlection to the Legislature, upon being appointed Secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society, removing to Philadelphia, and remaining there two years, at the end of which time the office ofThe Pennsylvania Freeman, which he edited, was sacked and burned by a mob.
Few men in the world had a closer acquaintance with this same many-headed monster than our gentle poet, for he has been followed by mobs,hustled by them, assailed by them, carrying himself with defiant courage through them all; and it is a tremendous range of experience that a man finds, asMr.Whittier was able to do, between being assaulted by a midnight mob and being chosen the Presidential Elector for a sovereign State.
After the suppression of his paper—this was at a time when the Legislature of Georgia had offered a reward of five thousand dollars for the arrest of the editor ofThe Liberator,—Mr.Whittier sold the old Haverhill homestead and removed to Amesbury, a lovely town, the descendant of Queen Guinevere’s Almbresbury, neighbor of Stonehenge and old Sarum, which seems a proper spot for him as for a new Sir Galahad; and from this time he began to send out those periodical volumes of verses which have won him the heart of the world. Here his lovely sister Elizabeth, herself a poet, with his mother, and his Aunt Mercy—the three loved of all “Snowbound’s” lovers,—brightened the home for years, one by one withdrawing from it at last for their long home, and leaving him alone, but for the subsequent sweet companionship of his nieces, who themselves went away in their turn for homes of their own.
The poet’s dwelling in Amesbury was exceedingly simple and exquisitely neat, the exterior of apale cream color, with many trees and shrubs about it, while, within, one room opens into another till you reach the study that should be haunted by the echoes of all sweet sounds, for here have been written the most of those verses full of the fitful music,
Of winds that out of dreamland blew.
Here, in the proper season, the flames of a cheerful fire dance upon the brass andirons of the open hearth, in the centre of a wall lined with books; water-colors by Harry Fenn and Lucy Larcom and Celia Thaxter, together with interesting prints, hang on the other walls, rivaled, it may be, by the window that looks down a sunny little orchard, and by the glass-topped door through which you see the green dome of Powow Hill. What worthies have been entertained in this enticing place! Garrison, and Phillips, and Higginson, and Wasson, and Emerson, and Fields, and Bayard Taylor, and Alice and Phœbe Cary, and Gail Hamilton, and Anna Dickinson, are only a few of the names that one first remembers, to say nothing of countless sweet souls, unknown to any other roll of fame than heaven’s, who have found the atmosphere there kindred to their own.
The people of Amesbury, and of the adjoining villages and towns, felt a peculiar ownership of their poet; there is scarcely a legend of all the region round which he has not woven into his song,and the neighborhood feel not only as if Whittier were their poet, but in some way the guardian spirit, the genius of the place. Perhaps in his stern and sweet life he has been so, even as much as in his song. “There is no charge toMr.Whittier,” once said a shopman of whom he had made a small purchase; and there is no doubt that the example would have been contagious if the independent spirit of the poet would have allowed it.
The Indian summer days of the poet’s life were spent not all in the places that knew him of old. The greater part of the winter was passed in Boston; a share of the summer always went to the White Hills, of which he was passionately fond, and the remainder of the time found him in the house of his cousins at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, still in his native county of Essex. This is a mansion, with its porches and porticoes and surrounding lawns and groves, which seems meet for a poet’s home; it stands in spacious and secluded grounds, shadowed by mighty oaks, and with that woodland character which birds and squirrels and rabbits, darting in the checkered sunshine, must always give. It is the home of culture and refinement, too, and as full of beauty within as without. Here many of the later poems were sent forth, and here fledglings had the unwarrantable impertinence to intrude with their callow manuscripts,and here those pests of prominence, the autograph seekers, sent their requests by the thousands. But in the early fall the poet stole quietly back to Amesbury, and there awaited Election Day, a day on which he religiously believed that no man has a right to avoid his duty, and of which he always thought as when he saw
Along the streetThe shadows meetOf Destiny, whose hand concealsThe moulds of fateThat shape the State,And make or mar the common weal.
What a life he had to look back upon, as he sat with his fame about him—what storms and what delights, what struggle and what victory! With all the deep and wonderful humility of spirit that he bore before God and man, yet it is doubtful if he could have found one day in it that he would have changed, so far as his own acts were concerned. It is certain that no one else could find it.
In appearance,Mr.Whittier was to the last as upright in bearing as ever; his eye was as black and burned with as keen a fire as when it flashed over the Concord mob, and saw beauty everywhere as freshly as when he cried out with the “Voices of Freedom” and sang the “Songs of Labor”; and his smile was the same smile that won the worship of men, and of women, too, for sixty years andover. Now it is with a sort of tenderness that people speak and think of him whose walk in life ended September 7, 1892. It seemed impossible to think that such vitality and power and spirit could ever cease. And indeed, it has not ceased, for it has been transferred into loftier regions, where his earthly songs are set to the music of the morning-stars as they sing together.
Harriet Prescott Spofford.