III

As a poet should sing of his home, Whittier sang the beauties of the scenery in and around the town in which he lived, its walks and drives giving views of hilltop and lake, of stream and ocean.

Amesbury is set among the hills, Powow Hill at its back and the swift stream of the same name running from the foot of this hill through the town and going on to join the Merrimac. Amesbury is a border town—the only town of this name in the whole country, this and its neighbor Salisbury being called from the famous Amesbury and its adjacent Salisbury in England. Amesbury with the beautiful Merrimac River on its south, has on its north the rounded summits which make New Hampshire from its very beginning the land of hills. It was one of the earliest settled towns in America, receiving its name in 1667, and electing its board of “Prudenshall” the following year. From earliest times, Whittier’s own family figured largely in the annals of this region, Whittier Hill in Amesbury having been named from one of his ancestors. It was impossible that Whittier should not have deep interest in its history and legends, and in its people among whom he had intimate and dear friends.

With the poet’s keen eye for beauty he saw

“the winding Powow foldThe green hill in its belt of gold.”

“the winding Powow fold

The green hill in its belt of gold.”

He pictures on the banks of the Powow old “Cobbler Keezar” beholding through his magic lapstone the river, then

“Woodsy and wild and lonesome,”

changed to the day when the mighty forest was “broken by many a steepled town.”

A stone’s throw from Whittier’s grave still stands the house of “Goodman Macey,” the hero of the poem, “The Exiles,” which tells his story. The haunted house in the poem, “The New Wife and the Old,” is still pointed out in Hampton, although recently it has been removed to another site, restored and inhabited by other than ghosts. “Margaret Smith’s Journal,” in his prose writings, takes the reader through the woods of Newbury giving many a picturesque incident of the life of the times—and many a touching one. “The Double-Headed Snake” is a legend of Newbury; “The Bridal of Pennacook” sketches the upper portions of the Merrimac; “The Swan Song of Parson Avery” sends its singer from the Newbury shores out beyond the bar and intothe great ocean. In his songs the poet carries us along the Salisbury shore of the river to the Chain Bridge which crosses it at Deer Island, the home of Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, his contemporary, herself novelist and poet; thence up the Newbury shore to that poem of streamlets, the Artichoke, which slipping beneath the overhanging boughs of trees that all but meet across it, goes through the old mill race—Curson’s Mill—to join the Merrimac.

Beyond the woods and the two rivers lies the ocean. “The Tent on the Beach” describes the long stretch of Salisbury before its invasion, first by shanties and then by hotels and casinos and cottages, transformed its picturesque solitudes. But nothing can make less magnificent the long roll of the incoming surf along its six miles of almost unbroken reach of sands.

In one of his letters Whittier says:

“The country about here never looked so beautiful as now. We went to Salisbury pine woods yesterday after meeting. I never saw such perfect and glorious effects of light and shadow—such perfection of green earth and blue sky—such grottoes and labyrinths of verdure, barred at the entrance by solid beams of sunlight, like golden gates. At such times I wish I were a painter.”

In this same letter the poet gives a touch of home life. “We had a pleasant visit from Lucy Larcom last week,” he writes. “Brother Frank was here on sixth day on his way from Boston—will be back tomorrow or next day. We have had the famous Moncure Conway here. He came over last week with the Cursons.”

“The Cursons” were two interesting sisters of fine New England ancestry. The sisters with their mother lived at Curson’s Mills where the fairy Artichoke flows to meet the Merrimac. It was to these sisters Whittier’s “Lines after a Summer’s Day’s Excursion” were written:

“Thanks for your graceful oars, which brokeThe morning dreams of ArtichokeAlong his wooded shore!Varied as varying Nature’s ways,Sprites of the river, woodland fays,Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”

“Thanks for your graceful oars, which brokeThe morning dreams of ArtichokeAlong his wooded shore!

“Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke

The morning dreams of Artichoke

Along his wooded shore!

Varied as varying Nature’s ways,Sprites of the river, woodland fays,Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”

Varied as varying Nature’s ways,

Sprites of the river, woodland fays,

Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”

In “Snow Bound” Whittier speaks to his brother as being the only one of that family group left beside himself. The tie between the brothers was very close. Many times the poet’s letters refer to this brother, enjoying him in health, watching over him when ill, and following him with fadeless love when Franklin passed on before him.

A relative of the Whittiers and at one time in the poet’s family has spoken to the writer of the brightness and wit of Franklin, himself also a writer although under an assumed name, and of the brilliant conversation of the two men as they sat together in the garden room, their reminiscences and familiar talk interrupted by peals of laughter. For the poet who showed chiefly his grave side to the world had in him a rich vein of humor—and his friends and neighbors knew that it never gave out through want of being worked! Franklin’s daughter, her aunt’s namesake, lived with the poet from early girlhood until her marriage.

How Whittier loved all that region! But most of all, he sings of the Merrimac—river worthy of his songs!—of the Merrimac bordering the town of his birth and of his later home, the river of which he says “never was it by its valley-born forgotten.” With what delight he pictures its loveliness from its source among “Winnepesaukee’s hundred isles, through the green repose of Plymouth meadows, the gleam and ripple of Campton rills,” to where it flows, “green-tufted, oak-shaded by Amoskeag’s fall,” and adown its gleaming miles to “Salisbury’s beach of shining sand.”

Whittier’s Indian poems, except “Mogg Megone” and “Pentucket,” breathe that note of sadness for the defeated and sorrowing which he always felt and which his spirit will feel until such defeat and sorrow are wiped out of the world—the very spirit of his writings and of his life.

“Still thy love, O Christ arisen,Yearns to reach these souls in prison.”

“Still thy love, O Christ arisen,

Yearns to reach these souls in prison.”

To his faith the message of the Spirit is sent everywhere and its

“... tongues of fireOn dusty tribes and twilight centuries sit.”

“... tongues of fire

On dusty tribes and twilight centuries sit.”

Mrs. Spofford in a delightful sketch of the poet tells how in the stirring events of the early days of the seventeenth century, in the midst of the bitter strife between the red man and the white, the Whittiers lived in the calm and safety of their own peaceful Quaker faith. They were as was William Penn to the red man. Indian attacks, Indian massacres, white women and children fleeing to the fort for their lives, white men with the rifles mowing down red savages—as the red savages whenever they could find or make opportunity tomahawked and scalped in hate the white intruders—theWhittier household had no part in these horrors; these were crimes they neither perpetrated nor suffered from. Their door was always on the latch; no gun was ever behind it, or in the hands of its men. The Indians entered and departed at will, always to meet with kindness and never to return this by injury, quick to distinguish between friend and foe, and ready to return kindness with confidence. For that household there were no wild terrors, no midnight massacres.

This fact, while it gives to the character the courage and faith in God and man shown by the Whittier ancestry as Friends, also, it should be remembered, speaks significantly for the appreciation of these traits by the “noble red man.” Many times the Indian has shown that he was capable of response to confidence in him and the appeal to his sense of honor.

At one time the poet was applied to for a fitting name for a house recently built in the region of Kenoza Lake on the outskirts of Haverhill. He answered the friends who forwarded the request:

“I have looked over Roger Williams’ ‘Key to the Indian Language,’ and find nothing that seems quite to answer Mr. S——’s purpose.

‘Yokomish—I lodge here.

Nowekin—I dwell here.

Wotomuck—At Home.

Washowanan—Hawk or Hawk’s Place.

Wussokat—Walnut Trees.’

Most of the names are very long and hard to pronounce. How would the name of the great Sachem, or Chief, on the Merrimac River and whose father owned the whole valley, do for the place? It is a pleasant, well-sounding name and wouldn’t be inappropriate; for the Sachem who bore it doubtless had wandered through the woods and fished in the lakes between which the house stands—Wolanset. He was the son of Passaconaway, the mightiest Indian chief in the Northern section of New England and who always made his home on the banks of the Merrimac. Both were friends of the whites and all the associations of their names are pleasant.”

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