If the poet, who never missed the humorous side of anything, did not strike his hand upon his knee and cry his familiar utterance, “Capital! Capital!” it was because at the moment the situation made it impossible to him. He surely appreciated his niece no less because she—one of his own family—had done what his foes, political and personal, had never been able to accomplish—outwitted him!
XXIII
Whittier sometimes received suggestions for his poems from stories told him directly, possibly, for the purpose, as was the case with the episode of “Barbara Frietchie.” But, no doubt, persons often gave him suggestions for poems without suspecting that they were doing so.
“I should think the old captain would come out of his grave, Mr. Whittier,” cried indignantly, Mrs. M——, a neighbor and friend, as she sat one evening in the garden room making complaint of a use, or, rather, of a disuse of something over which the members of the Improvement Society of the town—she being one—who were busy looking up its many antiquities, were very wrathful. “Yes, I should think he would come out of his grave,” she repeated, “to see that old well of his which he dug himself for the free use of the public all covered over with rubbish in this way. It ought to be opened up.”
She went on to free her mind still more concerning public rights and the neglect of these, as illustrated in the case of the old well dug by Valentine Bagley for the wayfarer, so that none who passed by might have to endure a tithe of the agony of thirst that he himself had known when at one time lost in the desert. Then in his distress he had vowed that should he ever return to his home, he would dig a well as a thank-offering. This was the well.
But what had been intended for a boon had become useless from neglect—a disfigurement.
The poet was deeply interested. “Yes,” he answered her, “it ought to be opened.” And in a moment he added, “We will have it opened.”
And in his own beautiful way Whittier told the true story of Valentine Bagley, an old-time worthy of Amesbury, of his shipwreck, his desert wanderings, his final rescue, and the carrying out of his resolve to save others from, at least, one of his many sufferings—thirst. The poem tells how by the side of the road running from what was then the village to the old ferry crossing the Merrimac, the returned wanderer dug this well for the benefit of all who were thirsting as they passed by it.
But it had been choked up by neglect and abuse.
Whittier’s poem, however, rescued it from this neglect and lifted it into fame.