“Is there, then, no death for a word once spoken?
Was never a deed but left its token
Written on tables never broken?”
His housekeeper, the Scotswoman before referred to, told how one day she had read Mr. Whittier an account in the paper of a weird light mysteriously seen at sea; and she added, “He wrote a poem about it.”
This was “The Palatine.”
One day after reading “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim” to the writer, he told her that he had written the poem to please himself in the story of what was dear to him, and that he did not so much care if people did not like it.
Indeed, the greatness of his fame never kept him from a certain depreciation of his own work, which declared itself in speech and often in his letters. The world sang his praises; but he held to his own verdicts.
“I love the old melodious lays
Which softly melt the ages through,”
he writes in the “Proem” of his published poems. He loved best the songs for which he could find no words—like all true poets. Who can say that he may not now be singing these in the music of a new tongue?