After the sacking and burning of the office of the Pennsylvania Freeman, Whittier returned to Haverhill, and soon after (in 1840) he sold the old farm and removed with his mother to Amesbury, a small town some nine miles nearer the sea than Haverhill. It is a rural town of over three thousand inhabitants, and contains nothing of note except the poet Whittier. The business of the place is the manufacture of woollen and cotton goods, and of carriages. The landscape is rugged and picturesque. The town covers a sloping hillside that stretches down to the Merrimack. Across this river rises a high hill, crowned with orchards and meadows. In summer time a sweet and quiet air reigns in the place. There are old vine-covered houses, grassy lawns, cool crofts, and sunken orchards; bees are This old meeting-house is alluded to by the poet in "Abram Morrison," a fine humorous poem published in "The King's Missive" (1881). We there read how— "On calm and fair First Days Rattled down our one-horse chaise Through the blossomed apple-boughs To the old, brown meeting-house." Whittier's house is a plain, white-painted structure, standing at the corner of two streets, and having in front of it numerous forest trees, chiefly maple. Since 1876 the poet has passed only a part of each year at Amesbury, his other home being Oak Knoll in Danvers, where he resides with distant relatives. THE WHITTIER HOUSE, AMESBURY, MASS.The study at Amesbury of course possesses great interest for us as the place where most of the poet's finest lyrics have been written. It is a very cosey little study, and is entered by one door from within and another from without. The upper half of the outer door is of glass. This door is at the end of the left-hand porch shown in the view on page 125. The two windows in the study look out upon a long strip of yard in the rear of the house,—very pretty and quiet, and filled with pear-trees and other trees and vines. Upon one side of the room are shelves holding five or six hundred well-used volumes. Among them are to be noticed Charles Reade's novels and the poems of Robert Browning. A side-shelf is completely filled with a small blue and gold edition of the poets. On the walls hang oil paintings of views on the Merrimack River and other Essex County scenes, including Mr. Whittier's birthplace. In one In the autumn of 1844 was written "The Stranger in Lowell," a series of light sketches suggested by personal experiences. The style of these essays reminds one of that of "Twice Told Tales," but it is not so pure. The thought is developed too rhetorically, and the essays betray the limitations attending the life of a recluse. But these sketches are interesting as exhibitions of the growth of the author toward this peculiar form of essay-writing, and are valuable on that account. In 1847 James G. Birney's anti-slavery paper, The Philanthropist, published in Cincinnati, was merged with the National Era, of Washington, D. C., with Dr. In the same year (1847) our author published his "Supernaturalism of New England." [New York and London: Wiley and Putnam.] This pleasant little volume shows a marked advance upon Whittier's previous prose work. In its nine chapters he has preserved a number of oral legends and interesting superstitions of the farmer-folk of the Merrimack region. Parts of the work have been quoted elsewhere in this volume. One of the chapters closes with the following fine passage:—
In 1849 Mr. Whittier collected and published his anti-slavery poems, under the title "Voices of Freedom." The year 1850 marks a new era in his poetical career. He published at that time his "Songs of Labor,"—a volume which showed that his mind had become calmed by time, and was now capable of interesting itself in other than reform subjects. There is not much of outward incident and circumstance to record of the quiet poetical years passed since 1840 at Amesbury and Danvers. Almost every year or two a new volume of poems has been issued, each one establishing on a firmer foundation the Quaker Poet's reputation as a creator of sweet and melodious lyrical poetry. In 1868 an institution called "Whittier College" was opened at Salem, Henry County, Iowa. It was founded in honor of the poet, and is conducted in accordance with the principles of the Society of Friends. In 1871 Whittier edited "Child-Life: A Collection of Poems," by various home and foreign authors. In the same year he edited, with a long introduction, the "Journal of John Woolman." The name John Woolman is not widely known to persons of the present generation; and yet, as Whittier says, it was this humble Quaker reformer of New Jersey who did more than any one else to inspire all the great modern movements for the emancipation of slaves, first in the West Indies, then Woolman was born in Northampton, West Jersey, in 1720. One day, in the year 1742, while clerk in a store in the village of Mount Holly, township of Northampton, N. J., he was asked by his employer to make out the bill of sale of a negro. He drew up the instrument, but his conscience was awakened, and some years after he began his life-work as a pedestrian anti-slavery preacher. He refused to ride in, or have letters sent him by, the stage-coaches, because of the cruelty exercised toward the horses by the drivers. Neither would he accept hospitality from those who kept Mount Holly, in Woolman's day, says Whittier, "was almost entirely a settlement of Friends. A very few of the old houses with their quaint stoops or porches are left. That occupied by John Woolman was a small, plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each story in front, a four-barred fence enclosing the grounds, with the trees he planted and loved to cultivate. The house was not painted, but whitewashed. The name of the place is derived from the highest hill in the county, rising two hundred feet above the sea, and commanding a view of a rich and level country of cleared farms and woodlands." Very amusing is the picture given by Mr. Whittier of the eccentric Benjamin Lay, once a member of the Society of Friends in England, and afterward an inhabitant for some time of the West Indies, whence he was driven away on account of the violence and extravagance of his denunciations of slavery. He was a contemporary of Woolman. He lived in a cave near Philadelphia, as a sort of Jonah or Elijah, prophesying woe against the city on account of its participation in the crime of slavery. He wore clothes made of vegetable fibre, and ate only vegetable food. "Issuing from his cave, on his mission of preaching 'deliverance to the captive,' he was in the habit of visiting the various meetings for worship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to their disgust and indignation. On one occasion he entered the Market Street Meeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out. A burly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate and thrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of the street. There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystanders that he did "His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentric life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunch-backed, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semicircle of beard falling low on his breast,—a figure to recall the old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold. Such was the irrepressible prophet who troubled the Israel of slaveholding Quakerism, clinging like a rough chestnut-burr to the skirts of its respectability, and settling like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience. "On one occasion, while the annual meeting was in session at Burlington, N. J., in the midst of the solemn silence of the great assembly, the unwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat, was seen passing up the aisle. Stopping midway, he exclaimed, 'You slaveholders! There is something overwhelmingly ludicrous about this bladder of poke-weed juice! And what a subject for a painter!—the portentous, white-bearded dwarf standing there in the midst of the church, in act to plunge his gigantic sword tragically into the innermost bowels of the crimson poke-juice bladder, and from all parts of the house the converging looks of the broad-brimmed and shovel-bonneted Quakers! Mr. Whittier further says that "Lay was In 1873 Mr. Whittier edited "Child-Life in Prose." It is a collection of pretty stories, chiefly about the childhood of various eminent persons. One of the stories is by the editor, and is about "A Fish that I Didn't Catch." In 1875 appeared "Songs of Three Centuries." The poet's design in this work was (to use his own words) "to gather up in a comparatively small volume, easily accessible to all classes of readers, the wisest |