Oh, sweet, fond dream of human love!
For thee I may not pray,”
he sings in “The Wish of Today.”
An Amesbury neighbor, a cousin of “The Countess” of his poem, told the writer of a remark of his. “All the ladies with whom I am associated are in homes different from mine,” he had said, it may be speaking especially of the friends of his early days. But she had added that all his life, wherever he had been placed he had been socially among the first.
This same neighbor also repeated the poet’s remark to another friend who, too, was related to the heroine of one of his poems. “In one thing thee have done better than I have,” he had said to him—“thee have married a good wife.”
The finest comment in Carpenter’s book on Whittier is that upon “Benedicite.” No other poem so expresses the renunciation of Whittier’s life and that purity and holiness of character which made women especially his dear and loving friends.
Once, unknown to the poet, his sister sent to the doctor’s home for inspection an exquisite miniature on ivory of a very beautiful woman. Miss Whittier’s message with the miniature was that this was the portrait of a lady whom the poet had loved, but that she had turned from him and married another. Now, however, in her widowhood and his greater fame she had looked back at him again.
Today’s question is, would she have been won had she found in him his old ardor and less resignation? At least she complained to him of the loss of this ardor. His letters assured her that his feelings to her were the same, but that her “fine artistic nature” could not endure the hard, uncongenial influences of his life surroundings. How much had his ardent emotion softened into tender and constant friendship? If his narrow income at that time forbade him; or if loyalty to his sister would not permit him to put another over the home of which she had been so long the light, who can tell?