XXIX
“I go to Amesbury this week,” wrote the poet from Oak Knoll in one of his later years, “to attend our Quarterly Meeting there [the Quarterly Meeting of the Friends]. “I have not been very well this spring; but the east winds must be nearly over and I hope I shall feel better.”
“I suppose we all need to feel our weakness and dependence upon our Father,” he added, in answer to his correspondent, “and that it is well for us to find ourselves walking the Valley of Humiliation; but I like the hills and the sunshine, after all.” And the hills and the sunshine of joy were what he liked to lead others to when he could.
With his invincible diffidence as to his own work, he spoke of “My poem in the ‘Atlantic,’” deprecating its merit but referring to it as a sad revelation of “the old time.”
He had written before in the same strain of another of his poems there.
One day there came to him at Oak Knoll a person who had known him long and well but had recently done something thoughtlessly with which she afterward perceived that he hadreason to be offended. She had come to him resolved to tell him of it, and believing that, since he was so kind, this would not be hard to do.
But it was hard; and as after the greeting she sat listening and saying little, the sense of her own mistake grew upon her. How could she bear it if he should lose confidence, even in her judgment?
“There is something I have done in regard to you, Mr. Whittier,” she began at last——“and I’m afraid you’ll be angry with me,” she added with a new fearfulness.
Instantly, he turned his face from the fire into which he had been gazing and looked at her. He read all her fears. His whole face softened. His flashing eyes met hers.
“I shall not be angry long,” he answered; and was silent, waiting.
But the glance, the perfect assurance of the tone were more than comfort; they were comprehension and the glad evidence of a trust too firm to be lightly overthrown. And as she told her story, freely now, it turned out that he had known it, and in a moment by his tact and judgment had righted everything she had feared that she had tangled.
“I have been unable to write for some weeks except at rare intervals, as my eyes are failingme, and my general health and strength are so diminished,” he wrote from Amesbury in the May of 1889. “I never expect to write again except an occasional note in private correspondence. The mental effort of dictation which I have tried is too hard for me. Phebe [the adopted daughter of his cousin, Mrs. Woodman at Oak Knoll] has tried to be my amanuensis, but to little purpose. I can only read for a few minutes without pain. I should not venture to engage to write anything for the public. My work is over—I can do no more, but must silently wait for the end which cannot be far off. Letter after letter meanwhile comes to me which I cannot answer, and people come to see me whom I cannot talk with.”
Yet he rallied his strength. For it was after this letter that the last beautiful message of his poems—“At Sundown”—printed and not published at that time, was sent out by him in greeting to his friends.
Whatever his weakness and weariness of body, his prayer,
“Let my last days be my best,”
“Let my last days be my best,”
“Let my last days be my best,”
“Let my last days be my best,”
was answered. For the soul in him was thatshining “light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.”
After his recovery from “grippe” with which he had been dangerously ill, the writer held a long conversation with him at the home of his cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Cartland of Newburyport.
In this conversation he seemed in clearness of vision, wideness of range, strength and grasp of subject, and especially in a certain energy, to carry her back to his days of comparative bodily vigor. All that his soul had had or held, it had and held more firmly than ever, and it had gained that higher outlook spread before the eyes of him whose feet are upon the mountains.
Not only did Whittier believe in immortality, but his very presence helped others to believe in it.