Few men of his day, of equal prominence, have been so greatly misunderstood as Whittier by the public which knows him only by the writings he allowed to be published. These reveal him on the one hand as an earnest reformer bitterly denouncing the sins of a guilty people, and on the other as a prophet of God, with a message of cheer to those who turn them from their evil ways. While slavery existed, he lashed the institution with a whip of scorpions, and in later years, in poems of exquisite sweetness, he sang of "The Eternal Goodness," and brought words of consolation and hope to despairing souls. In the popular mind there has been built up for him a reputation for extreme seriousness and even severity. To be sure, some of the poems in his collected works have witty and even merry lines, but they usually have a serious purpose. The real fun and frolic of his nature were known only to those privileged with his intimacy. He delighted at times in throwing off his mantle of prophecy, and unbending even to jollity, in his home life and among friends. The presence of a stranger was a check to such exuberance. And it was not from any unsocial habit that he fell into this restraint. It was because he found that the unguarded words of a public man are often given a weight they were not intended to bear. If he unbent as one might whose every word has not come to be thought of value, it led to misunderstandings. In his home and among near friends he revealed a charming readiness to engage in lively and frolicsome conversation.

Some stories illustrating his keen sense of humor, and specimens of verse written in rollicking vein for special occasions, which might not properly find place in a serious attempt at biography, I have thought might be allowed in such an informal work as this. Few of the lines I shall here give have ever appeared in any of his collected works, and some of them were never before in print. I am sure I do no wrong to his memory in thus bringing out a phase of his character which could not be fully treated in biography.

I never heard him laugh aloud, but a merrier face and an eye that twinkled with livelier glee when thoroughly amused are not often seen. He would double up with mirth without uttering a sound,—his chuckle being visible instead of audible,—but this peculiar expression of jollity was irresistibly infectious. The faculty of seeing the humorous side of things he considered a blessing to be coveted, and he had a special pity for that class of philanthropists who cannot find a laugh in the midst of the miseries they would alleviate. A laugh rested him, and any teller of good stories, any writer of lively adventures, received a hearty greeting from him. He told Dickens that his "Pickwick Papers" had for years been his remedy for insomnia, and Sam Weller had helped him to many an hour of rested nerves. He loved and admired Longfellow and Lowell, and they were his most cherished friends, but the lively wit of Holmes had a special charm for him, and jolly times they had whenever they met. The witty talk and merry letters of Gail Hamilton, full as they were of a mad revelry of nonsense, were a great delight to him. It was not in praise of but in pity for Charles Sumner that he wrote:—

As an illustration of his own way of speaking the thing he did not mean, just for fun, take the following: More than thirty years ago, a Division of the Sons of Temperance was organized in Amesbury, and his niece, one of his household, joined it. Her turn came to edit a paper for the Division, and she asked her uncle to contribute something. He had often complained in a laughing way in regard to the late hours of the club, and had threatened to lock her out. This accounts for the tone of the following remarkable contribution to temperance literature from one of the oldest friends of the cause:—

Whittier's favorite way of enjoying his annual vacation among the mountains was to go with a party of his relatives and neighbors, and take possession of a little inn at West Ossipee, known as the "Bearcamp House." Sturtevant's, at Centre Harbor, was another of his resorts. At these places his party filled nearly every room. It was made up largely of young people, full of frolic and love of adventure. The aged poet could not climb with them to the tops of the mountains; but he watched their going and coming with lively interest, and of an evening listened to their reports and laughed over the effervescence of their enthusiasm. Two young farmers of West Ossipee, brothers named Knox, acted as guides to Chocorua. They had some success as bear hunters, and supplied the inn with bear steaks. One day in September, 1876, the Knox brothers took a party of seven of Whittier's friends to the top of Chocorua, where they camped for the night among the traps that had been set for the bears. They heard the growling of the bears in the night, so the young ladies reported, with other blood-curdling incidents. Soon after the Knox brothers gave a husking at their barn,[7] and the whole Bearcamp party was invited. Whittier wrote a poem for the occasion, and induced Lucy Larcom to read it for him as from an unknown author, although he sat among the huskers. It was entitled:—

The next day after the husking, Lucy Larcom and some others of the party prepared a burlesque literary exercise for the evening at the inn. She wrote a frolicsome poem, and others devised telegrams, etc., all of which were to surprise Whittier, who was to know nothing of the affair until it came off. When the evening came, the venerable poet took his usual place next the tongs, and the rest of the party formed a semicircle around the great fireplace. On such occasions Whittier always insisted on taking charge of the fire, as he did in his own home. He even took upon himself the duty of filling the wood-box. No one in his presence dared to touch the tongs. By and by telegrams began to be brought in by the landlord from ridiculous people in ridiculous situations. Some purported to come from an old poet who had the misfortune to be caught by his coat-tails in one of the Knox bear-traps on Chocorua. It was suggested that he might be the author of the poem read at the husking. Lucy Larcom, who, by the way, was another of the writers popularly supposed to be very serious minded, but who really was known among her friends as full of fun, read a poem addressed to the man in the bear-trap, entitled:—

Whittier evidently enjoyed the fun, and after the rest had had their say, he remarked, "That old fellow in the bear-trap must be in extremis. He ought to make his will. Suppose we help him out!" He asked one of us to get pencil and paper and jot down the items of the will, each to make suggestions. It ended, of course, in his making the whole will himself, and doing it in verse. It is perhaps the only poem of his which he never wrote with his own hand. It came as rapidly as the scribe could take it. Every one at that fireside was remembered in this queer will—even the "boots" of the inn, the stage-driver, and others who were looking upon the sport from the doorway.

This is all of the will that was written that evening; but the next morning, at breakfast, I found under my plate a note-sheet, with some penciling on it. As I opened it, Mr. Whittier, with a quizzical look, said, "Thee will notice that the bear-trap man has added a codicil to his will." This is the codicil:—

I had to go back to my editorial desk in Portland that day, and immediately received there this note from Mr. Whittier:—

"Dear Mr. P.,—Don't print in thy paper my foolish verses, which thee copied. They are hardly consistent with my years and 'eminent gravity,' and would make 'the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things.'"

I had no thought at the time of giving to the public this jolly side of Whittier's character, but do it now with little misgiving, as it is realized by every one that "a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." Whittier's capacity for serious work is well known, and his love of play never interfered with it. An earnest man without a sense of humor is a machine without a lubricant, worn out before its work is done. There can be no doubt that Whittier owed his length of days to his happy temperament.

Here is a story of Whittier told by Alice Freeman Palmer: One evening they sat in Governor Claflin's library, in Boston, and he was taking his rest telling ghost stories. Mrs. Claflin had given strict orders that no visitor be allowed to intrude on Mr. Whittier when he was resting. Suddenly, at the crisis of a particularly interesting story, there was a commotion in the hall, and the rest of that story was not told. A lady had called to see the poet, and would not be denied. The domestic could not stop her, and she came straight into the library. She walked up to Whittier and seized both his hands, saying, "Mr. Whittier, this is the supreme moment of my life!" The poor man in his distress blushed like a school-girl, and shifted from one foot to the other; he managed to get his hands free, and put them behind him for further security. And what do you think he said? All he said was, "Is it?" Miss Freeman thought a third party in the way, and slipped out. As she was going upstairs, she heard a quick step behind her, and Whittier took her by the shoulder and shook her, saying as if angry, "Alice Freeman, I believe thee has been laughing at me!" She could not deny it. "What would thee do, Alice Freeman, if a man thee never saw should come up in that way to thee, take both hands, and tell thee it was the supreme moment of his life?"

Probably the most seriously dangerous position in which he was ever placed was on the occasion of the looting and burning of Pennsylvania Hall, in the spring of 1838. His editorial office was in the building, and for two or three days the mob had been threatening its destruction before they accomplished it. It was not safe for him to go into the street except in disguise. And yet it was at this very time that he wrote the following humorous skit, never before in print. Theodore D. Weld had the year before made a contract of perpetual bachelorhood with Whittier, and yet he chose this troublous time to marry the eloquent South Carolina Quakeress, Angelina GrimkÉ, who had freed her slaves and come North to rouse the people, and was creating a sensation on the lecture platform. Her burning words in Pennsylvania Hall had helped to make the mob furious. Whittier's humorous arraignment of his friend for breaking his promise of celibacy was written at this critical time, and he was obliged to disguise himself when he carried his epithalamium on the wedding night to the door of the bridegroom. He had been invited to assist at the wedding service, but as the bride was marrying "out of society," Whittier's orthodoxy compelled him to decline the invitation.

In 1874, Gail Hamilton's niece was married at her house in Hamilton, and she sent a grotesque invitation to Whittier, asking him to come to her wedding, and prescribing a ridiculous costume he might wear. As a postscript she mentioned that it was her niece who was to be married. Whittier sent this reply, pretending not to have noticed the postscript, but finally waking up to the fact that she was not herself to be the bride:—

An aged Quaker friend from England, himself a bachelor, was once visiting Mr. Whittier, and was shown to his room by the poet, when the hour for retiring came. Soon after, he was heard calling to his host in an excited tone, "Thee has made a mistake, friend Whittier; there are female garments in my room!" Whittier replied soothingly, "Thee had better go to bed, Josiah; the female garments won't hurt thee."

Here is a specimen of his frolicsome verse written after he was eighty years of age. It deals largely in personalities, was meant solely for the perusal of a few friends whom it pleasantly satirized, and was never before in print. When the bronze statue of Josiah Bartlett was to be erected in Amesbury, Whittier of course was called upon for the dedicatory ode, and he wrote "One of the Signers" for the occasion. The unveiling of the statue occurred on the Fourth of July, 1888, and as might have been anticipated, the poet could not be prevailed upon to be present. The day before the Fourth he went to Oak Knoll, "so as to keep in the quiet," he said. But his thoughts were on the celebration going on at Amesbury, and they took the form of drollery. He imagined himself occupying the seat on the platform which had been reserved for him, and these amusing verses were composed, the satirical allusions in which would be appreciated by his townspeople. The president of the day was Hon. E. Moody Boynton, a descendant of the signer, and the well-known inventor of the bicycle railway, the "lightning saw," etc. He has the reputation of having the limberest tongue in New England, as well as a brain most fertile in invention. The orator of the day was Hon. Robert T. Davis, then member of Congress, a former resident of Amesbury, and like Bartlett a physician. Jacob R. Huntington, to whose liberality the village is indebted for the statue, is a successful pioneer in the carriage-building industry of the place. It was cannily decided to give the statue to the State of Massachusetts, so as to have an inducement for the Governor to attend the dedication. Whittier's play on this fact is in the best vein of his drollery. The statue is of dark bronze, and this gave a chance for his amusing reference to the Kingston Democrats, whom he imagined as coming across the state line to attend the celebration. Dr. Bartlett was buried in their town. Professor J. W. Churchill, of Andover, one of the "heretics" of the Seminary, was to read the poem. The other persons named were eccentric characters well known in Amesbury:—

In giving this picture of a poet at play, I have presented a side of Whittier's character heretofore overlooked, although to his intimate friends it was ever in evidence. I think there are few of the lovers of his verse who, if they are surprised by these revelations, will not also be pleased to become acquainted with one of his methods of recreation.

When Edmund Gosse visited this country in 1884, he called upon Mr. Whittier, and this is the impression he received of his personality: "The peculiarity of his face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with thick black eyelashes curiously curved inward. This bar of vivid black across the countenance was startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white beard and hair, offering a sort of contradiction which was surprising and presently pleasing. He struck me as very gay and cheerful, in spite of his occasional references to the passage of time and the vanishing of beloved faces. He even laughed frequently and with a childlike suddenness, but without a sound. His face had none of the immobility so frequent with very aged persons; on the contrary, waves of mood were always sparkling across his features, and leaving nothing stationary there except the narrow, high, and strangely receding forehead. His language, very fluent and easy, had an agreeable touch of the soil, an occasional rustic note in its elegant colloquialism, that seemed very pleasant and appropriate, as if it linked him naturally with the long line of sturdy ancestors of whom he was the final blossoming. In connection with his poetry, I think it would be difficult to form in the imagination a figure more appropriate to Whittier's writings than Whittier himself proved to be in the flesh."