Varied as varying Nature’s ways,
Sprites of the river, woodland fays,
Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”
In “Snow Bound” Whittier speaks to his brother as being the only one of that family group left beside himself. The tie between the brothers was very close. Many times the poet’s letters refer to this brother, enjoying him in health, watching over him when ill, and following him with fadeless love when Franklin passed on before him.
A relative of the Whittiers and at one time in the poet’s family has spoken to the writer of the brightness and wit of Franklin, himself also a writer although under an assumed name, and of the brilliant conversation of the two men as they sat together in the garden room, their reminiscences and familiar talk interrupted by peals of laughter. For the poet who showed chiefly his grave side to the world had in him a rich vein of humor—and his friends and neighbors knew that it never gave out through want of being worked! Franklin’s daughter, her aunt’s namesake, lived with the poet from early girlhood until her marriage.
How Whittier loved all that region! But most of all, he sings of the Merrimac—river worthy of his songs!—of the Merrimac bordering the town of his birth and of his later home, the river of which he says “never was it by its valley-born forgotten.” With what delight he pictures its loveliness from its source among “Winnepesaukee’s hundred isles, through the green repose of Plymouth meadows, the gleam and ripple of Campton rills,” to where it flows, “green-tufted, oak-shaded by Amoskeag’s fall,” and adown its gleaming miles to “Salisbury’s beach of shining sand.”
Whittier’s Indian poems, except “Mogg Megone” and “Pentucket,” breathe that note of sadness for the defeated and sorrowing which he always felt and which his spirit will feel until such defeat and sorrow are wiped out of the world—the very spirit of his writings and of his life.
“Still thy love, O Christ arisen,
Yearns to reach these souls in prison.”