The hazel’s yellow blossoms shine,
The tawny gold of Afric’s mine!”
So, throughout the year bloom and brightness, fragrance and beauty find their records in the songs of the poet. “What airs outblown from ferny dells!” he exclaims in his “Last Walk in Autumn” where he treads as if a painter’s brush were in his hand, bringing to the reader’s eye “winter’s dazzling morns” and “sunset lights” and “moonlit snows,” to atone for the loss of summer bloom and greenness.
Whittier took great pride in the beauty and diversity of the flora of his own Essex County; he used to say that it was the richest and most varied of the region. He wrote more than one poem to celebrate autumn festivals in his own town.
In his walks with his sister in her later years, as he writes of her, “too frail and weak” to go herself in search of the flowers she longed for, he would make her rest upon a rock or grassy bank and alone would search for the treasures of wood and field of which both were so fond.
One day when returning from Boston to Amesbury he met a young friend of his on the train. As the two were talking together, a boy selling water lilies passed through the car. The poet bought a bunch of them and gave to his companion. As they sat looking at the exquisite flowers, he said to her: “Thee’d hardly think that the same Hand that made those made snakes.”
That August day while the flowers glowed in the throat of the Franklin stove, converting blackness into splendor, the poet sat in his arm-chair telling his visitor somewhat of the book into which she had peeped while waiting for him; telling her also of other books, and of people and things.
In the talk and laughter that followed he spoke of Dickens, of whose writings the poet was very fond, declaring that he was never so restless, or so troubled over politics, or so blue about himself, or the weather, that he could not have a good laugh over “Pickwick.”