“I am here [in Amesbury] at the election, and am glad of the result. I shall probably go back to Danvers soon. I dread the coming winter. But all will be as God wills and that will be best.”
But neither age nor illness made him neglect his vote.
Later, regretting a friend’s illness, he says:
“There is so much to be done in this world and so many of us are unable to take our part in the work our hands find to do.”
Again, he dreads the winter. “I wait for it in no defiant mood,” he says, “I can scarcely imagine that I am the same person who used to welcome it.”
A band of colored singers whom the Hampton Institute had trained to delight Northern ears with their music, came to the poet at Oak Knoll, and standing about him with a reverence born of their knowledge of what he had been to their race, they sang to him.
As the poet listened he was filled with remembrances of the days of slavery and the contrast of their present freedom and hope, and wept in gratitude and joy.
Happily, the length and sufferings marking the upward road of the race were concealed from him.