But this poem, like others of Whittier's, is probably a composite of memories and largely imaginative, as is shown in what is elsewhere said about the localities of Ramoth Hill and Folly Mill.
MARY EMERSON (SMITH) THOMAS
EVELINA BRAY, AT THE AGE OF SEVENTEEN
In the "garden room" also is a miniature on ivory of a beautiful girl of seventeen, crowned with roses. This is Evelina Bray of Marblehead, a classmate of Whittier's at the Academy in the year 1827, when this portrait was painted. But for adverse circumstances, the school acquaintance which led to a warm attachment between them might have resulted in marriage. But the case was hopeless from the first. He was but nineteen years old, and she seventeen. On both sides the families opposed the match. Among the Quakers marriage "outside of society" was not to be thought of in those days; in his case it would mean the breaking up of a family circle dependent on him, and a severance from his loved mother and sister. This same reason prevented the ripening of other attachments in later life; for in each case his choice would have been "out of society." Two or three years after they parted at the close of an Academy term, he walked from Salem to Marblehead before breakfast on a June morning, to see his schoolmate. He was then editing the "American Manufacturer," in Boston. She could not invite him in, and they walked to the old ruined fort, and sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful harbor. This meeting is commemorated in three stanzas of one of the loveliest of his poems, "A Sea Dream"—a poem, by the way, not as a whole referring to Marblehead or to the friend of his youth. But I have good authority for the statement that these three stanzas refer directly to the Marblehead incident. All who are familiar with the locality will recognize it in these verses:—