“I came up here hoping to find strength in this region of mountains. But I cannot say that I have succeeded as yet. The Intervale House on the whole I like much better than the house at North Conway village. Mount Washington shows to best advantage here and the thick pine woods near are a comfort. There are but few people here yet; it has been too cold. The snow lies white on Washington. I expect Joseph and Gertrude Cartland this week. I do not know how long I shall remain here. Lizzie, who is still ill, is at Fryeburg only twelve miles from here.”
The pines mentioned in this letter from Intervale were almost adjoining the hotel there—magnificent trees, old enough for the Indians to have loved and left in their beauty. They are the entrance to woods so extensive and so dense that one day the poet, perceiving that a member of his party who had been sitting under a huge pine tree had vanished, came hurrying, breathless, up the slope to give warning not to go into the woods, as there was real danger of being lost in them.
The visit to Intervale to which he refers, and, later, that to Fryeburg, was during the summer of President Garfield’s illness. Those who saw the poet then will never forget his indignation and his sorrow over the martyred and suffering hero, nor the depth of his sympathy which rendered Whittier himself well-nigh ill.
After this time he wrote:
“I was foolish enough to take cold some five weeks ago and have not got over it yet. The season, so damp, so hot and cold by turns, has been a hard one for invalids, and, added to this, the depressing influence of the good President’s suffering and death. I think with thee that the death of the President is uniting the nation. God is overruling all for good.... I often think of our visits to the pines at Intervale and our ride up to Dr. Buzzell’s hill in Fryeburg.”
This drive was through a beautiful country, a portion of the way, however, winding through what must have been a magnificent forest before the fire fiend swept over the giants of the wood and left blackened stumps and great trunks of trees leafless and well-nigh branchless, pointing their blasted tops to the sky like arms uplifted to call down pity and help. But for all these ghosts of former days, the drive in the summer sunshine was a delightful experience, with summer foliage for a good part of the way, with hills at hand and the distant mountains.
The “Joseph and Gertrude” of whom the poet so often speaks in his letters were Mr. and Mrs. Cartland, both his cousins. They had spent the winter preceding his niece’s marriage with him in Amesbury. And during the latest years of his life he passed weeks and months at their home in Newburyport. They were frequently, perhaps always in later years, with him in his summerings among the hills. At one time principals of the Friends School in Providence, they were delightful in manners and conversation, their culture from books and social life mingling with their Quaker demureness, and, flashing through this, a brightness all their own. It was interesting to watch that likeness in unlikeness between Mr. Cartland and the poet, although, oddly enough, it was the former who recalled the poet, and never the poet him.
Jettie M—— for whom he wrote “The Henchman” and for whom the boat of his poem, “Voyage of the Jettie,” was named, was sometimes one of his summer companions among the hills.