Perhaps the bravest fight against ill health was put up by Robert Louis Stevenson, the gentle, lovable poet and novelist. As a young man he found that consumption threatened to carry him off. With the cheerfulness characteristic of the victims of the White Plague he set off on a series of outdoor trips afoot and afloat. Two of these are preserved for us in his "Inland Voyage" and the more fascinating "Travels with a Donkey." This latter is almost unequaled as a picture of travel. He finally started for America to see if the climate there would not be better for him than the moist weather of Scotland, his home. Eventually he reached Samoa, in the South Seas of the Pacific, where he lived for several years, cheerful and brave in spite of his increasing weakness. His character, although mild and kindly, was so forceful that the chiefs among the natives held him in veneration, and at the time of his death no one lamented him more than the simple Samoans, some of whom bore him to the grave on the hill-top near his home.
Thoreau, one of New England's philosophers of the great and glorious Emerson days, was as eccentric as any one that can be found. For the sake of peace and independence he went off into the woods and lived as a hermit near Walden Pond, outside Concord. To earn what little money he needed he made lead pencils; like many country folks of those days he was amazingly dexterous with his knife and his pencils were a delight to use. In his leisure he made an exhaustive study of the Pond; but in two years' time he left this little cabin and never returned. He said that he had had enough of that sort of life and now he was going to try something else. His was the same spirit of adventure that stirred the old explorers and yet he was so fond of New England that he rarely set foot outside her boundaries. He could find enough to keep him busy thinking and writing within his own dooryard. But he showed that it was possible for a man in good health to live on less than $100 a year and have more than two thirds of his time to himself. On the other hand, as he died of consumption at the age of forty-four, he also proved that outdoor life is not in itself a preventive of that scourge.
Whittier, the gentle Quaker poet, was one of the sturdiest heroes of the antislavery movement. In those days he was a fighter, stoned and mobbed by the partisans of slavery in Philadelphia and Concord, New Hampshire. His genius was discovered by William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, while he was editing a paper at Newburyport. Whittier's sister had sent some verses of her young brother's to the paper and Garrison not only printed them but hunted up the author to enlist him in his good work. In his latter years Whittier clung to the rural obscurity of Amesbury, where he enjoyed the rippling life of the little town, talking local politics with the 'natives' in the country store, chatting with his friends on the doorstep of the Friends' meeting-house which he had helped to build, or planting trees about it, like Holmes, who used to boast that at one time or another he had set out more than seven hundred saplings. Whittier, more than any other American, has left us glowing pictures of New England life and geniality. With his reverent sense of the need for emphasizing morals and duty there was a love of home, of the memory of youth's work and play that makes "Snow-Bound" immortal. Emerson was the Yankee philosopher; Hawthorne, the novelist of New England's moods; Thoreau, the nature-worshiper; Holmes, the Bostonian; Longfellow, the cosmopolitan poet; but Whittier was the poet of New England's heart.
['TO DRIVE DULL CARE AWAY']
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