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Ebook has 687 lines and 42790 words, and 14 pages

Release date: September 9, 2023

Original publication: Boston: The Riverdale Press, Brookline, 1925

WHITTIER AT CLOSE RANGE

FRANCES CAMPBELL SPARHAWK

BOSTON THE RIVERDALE PRESS, BROOKLINE 1925

BY FRANCES CAMPBELL SPARHAWK

Printed in the United States of America

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

F. C. S.

FOREWORD

Thanks are due to Messrs. J. B. Lippincott and Company, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, and "The Congregationalist" for the permitted use of articles written for them and now revised with the new material for the book.

"You do, indeed, know a great deal about uncle," wrote Whittier's niece, Mrs. Pickard, to the writer.

In the middle 1830's Whittier with his mother, her sister "Aunt Mercy," and his sister Elizabeth, "our youngest and our dearest" of "Snow Bound" memories, removed from his birthplace in Haverhill to the Amesbury home which grew to be so dear to him.

His townspeople held him in admiration and loving reverence. Some came to his home as honored citizens enter a city made free to them, and learned that his life was poetry no less than his writings.

In 1887 he said in a letter to the writer: "I think often of the old days when thy father was alive and sister Lizzie and we were all together."

As the daughter of his physician and friend, she has given in "Whittier at Close Range" intimate glimpses of his life and character.

FRANCES CAMPBELL SPARHAWK.

Brookline, Massachusetts.

WHITTIER AT CLOSE RANGE

In the garden room, worthy synonym of a poet's study where blossom flowers of thought and beauty, a young neighbor of the poet awaited his coming.

His easy chair stood with bookshelves on the right hand, whence he could gather from them as he pleased--although books were scattered everywhere over the house--and at its left was the table between the windows looking into the garden, while opposite it stood the door from the little hall, so that the chair faced all who entered the room. She looked across the room at a painting of a California sunset--Starr King's gift to the poet. Near the painting was the engraving of an Arctic scene sent to the poet and his sister Elizabeth by Dr. Kane on his return from his Arctic explorations. She remembered how for a long time the picture had failed to appear, and how when a duplicate had been sent and hung, this first picture had at last arrived, and had been given by Miss Whittier to one of her Amesbury friends.

The poet had banished from the garden room a fine oil painting of himself in his youth, a striking portrait, full of individuality, yet bearing a suggestion of Burns. But it was not strange that one poet should recall the other, since there was in some respects a marked resemblance in the moods and ideals of the two; while in character and life they were as far asunder as the poles.

"Matched with Scotland's heathery hills The sweetbrier and the clover."

All his life Whittier saw and taught

"The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."

What compensation to him for the limitations which his life work for the slave and his own delicate health imposed upon him! In proclaiming the slave his brother, Whittier came to perceive his own brotherhood with all men bound in whatever slavery of mind and soul, to see that simplicity and reality were the great forces of life and inspiration in poetry as in all other things. His own early instructions prepared him for Burns' assertion,

"A man's a man for a'that."

And from Burns' most beautiful song Whittier sings,

"With clearer eyes I saw the worth Of life among the lowly; The Bible at his cotter's hearth Has made my own more holy."

These dreams and perceptions made him the poet of New England idyls, as did his spiritual inspiration of her ideals. He looked with anointed eyes upon her woods and fields, her hills and streams and her rocky coast. It was first through Burns and then through his own life that he sang:

"Yet on life's current, he who drifts Is one with him who rows or sails; And he who wanders widest lifts No more of beauty's jealous veils Than he who from his doorway sees The miracle of flowers and trees, Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air And from cloud minaret hears the sunset call to prayer!"

He sings the beauty in brooks and fields, the oneness that pervades all nature, and how to the opened eyes,

"From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles, And Rome's cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles."

This world of beauty in everyday life Whittier has revealed to those who do not travel; he has opened their eyes to perceive how great are their possessions, not in the far-away, nor in the future, but here and now. Other poets may arouse longings for the unattainable; but Whittier has shown us how the manna of life lies at our own doors waiting for us to gather. Burns with inspired lyre sings of the daisy and the mouse, of the Doon and the Ayr, of men and of his "Highland Mary." Whittier sings of flower and tree and field, of mountain and river, of men and women. But over all his pictures arches the depth of the sky giving them perspective and illumination. When he sings of the sea,

"The ocean looketh up to God As 'twere a living thing; The homage of its waves is given In ceaseless worshipping."

And of life's trials,

To his ears is attuned the music heard through the silences, how

"The harp at Nature's advent strung Has never ceased to play; The songs the stars of morning sung Has never died away."

Before his eyes,

"The green earth sends her incense up;"

and to his vision,

"The mists above the morning rills Rise white as wings of prayer;"

to him

"The blue sky is the temple's arch."

What poet paints nature with a truer touch than he? To him the universe is one thought of God; to him all Nature is informed, not as by the many gods of Polytheism; but by a reverent Monotheism, by the touch of the All-Father and the response of a sentient world.

"So Nature keeps the reverent frame With which her years began, And all her signs and voices shame The prayerless heart of man."

What artist ever drew with brush a more perfect picture of midsummer heat than Whittier in his prelude to the poem, "Among the Hills":

"The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, Unfelt."

Then the sharp call of the locust stabbing "the noon-silence;" the driver asleep on his haycart; the sheep huddled against the shade of the stone-wall; and

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