VI
Whittier was born into love of right and freedom and the atmosphere of his home fostered this.
Even in speaking the words, “My mother,” his very tone changed to loving reverence. No doubt he owed much to her in the help and inspiration which great men so often owe to their mothers. Yet it was for what she embodied in herself, even more than what she was to him, that he reverenced her. She was a strong, high-souled woman, thoughtful and full of the ability and resources which the training of the Friends develops so remarkably in their woman. None of the broad questions which interested her son were too great for her. On the contrary, the life of devotion to the freedom of the slave which Whittier and his sister Elizabeth lived, had been born with them and preached into their ears and laid upon their hearts from their childhood. It was not Mrs. Whittier who followed their lead for companionship with them; it was they who took up the service to which she desired and prayed to have them consecrated.
“I shall not live to see the slaves made free,” said the poet’s mother one day to a friend.Then she added confidently, “But my children will.”
Was this prophecy the result of her faith in the inevitable triumph of righteousness and a guess so shrewd as to seem intuition concerning the causes at work to bring about this consummation speedily? Or did this devout Quaker speak the promptings of the Spirit when she uttered a prediction which at the time seemed so little likely to be fulfilled?
Yet it was fulfilled. Mrs. Whittier died in 1857. Her oldest daughter also died before the prophecy came to pass. But her two sons lived to rejoice in it; and Elizabeth, described in “Snow Bound” as “our youngest and our dearest,” her brother’s close comrade in intellectual and loving fellowship, died in the September of 1864, so that she lived beyond the day of the Emancipation Proclamation and saw its fulfillment in the triumph of the Union armies.
On the death of her mother, Elizabeth wrote of her to M—— C——, an intimate Amesbury friend absent at the time:
“Our dear mother was so unselfish and good, so pitiful and forbearing, so ready and hopeful.... I was not half thankful enough for such a mother. She was growing more and morebeautiful in her life each day. Very dear and lovely is her memory. We cannot doubt she has found the peace and rest that hath an everlasting continuance. I long for faith. I do indeed believe and try to look up for help in my unbelief. But for such a life and close as hers how dare I ever hope? I desire to trust in the sweet, childlike way I remember in her.”
At the time of Mrs. Whittier’s death, she with the poet and his sister Elizabeth was in the Amesbury home which had been bought after the sale of the farm and homestead in Haverhill, the birthplace of all her children. This Amesbury home was a small dwelling on Friend Street, named from the fact that it led past the Friends’ meeting-house not far from this new home. Whittier’s biographer tells how the poet planned the new meeting-house which stands further up the street and faces a small common, with a by-road winding down on its other side behind the village, as it then was, and leading on to the old burying-ground where the poet now lies.
In such simplicity of life and holiness of purpose must be invigorating power. No home of luxury and self-indulgence could have produced a Whittier.