Thus, in spite of being “half sick,” as he was sometimes—and sometimes wholly so, he had many happy days among the friends who gathered about him in the quiet summer resorts which he frequented as long as he had strength for the journeys. Occasionally, he went to Appledore, one of the most beautiful of the Isles of Shoals. Here the retreat of Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage kept him from the crowd. But more often he went to the hills; and this was especially true in his later years.
“I have been ill a good deal of the past month,” wrote the poet in the December of 1881, “and in addition I suffer from lameness in my knee. I begin to suspect I am growing old in earnest.... I have not been in Boston for nearly a year and have hardly courage to attempt it. Did any of you hear Archdeacon Farrar? He and Phillips Brooks came to see me and I was much pleased with him.”
In another letter Whittier says:
“I have been reading with a great deal of satisfaction Phillips Brooks’s ‘Sermons,’ not always agreeing with him, but liking his spirit and earnest convictions. He is a rare man.”
More than a year later Whittier wrote:
“I ought long ago to have written thee, but the sickness and death of my brother and my own illness have made my winter here a hard and sad one and compelled me to neglect my correspondence.... Lucy Larcom is in the city at Concord Square. I saw her last week. Do you ever come into the city? If so will you not call on me? I have not been about the city at all, but many of my old friends have called on me. What there is to see or hear I do not know. In some respects I might as well be in Amesbury as here. But I hope I am getting somewhat over my fatigue and illness, and am very thankful for it, and for the many blessings of my allotment.”