Few men of his day, of equal prominence, have been so greatly misunderstood as Whittier by the public which knows him only by the writings he allowed to be published. These reveal him on the one hand as an earnest reformer bitterly denouncing the sins of a guilty people, and on the other as a prophet of God, with a message of cheer to those who turn them from their evil ways. While slavery existed, he lashed the institution with a whip of scorpions, and in later years, in poems of exquisite sweetness, he sang of "The Eternal Goodness," and brought words of consolation and hope to despairing souls. In the popular mind there has been built up for him a reputation for extreme seriousness and even severity. To be sure, some of the poems in his collected works have witty and even merry lines, but they usually have a serious purpose. The real fun and frolic of his nature were known only to those privileged with his intimacy. He delighted at times in throwing off his mantle of prophecy, and unbending even to jollity, in his home life and among friends. The presence of a stranger was a check to such exuberance. And it was not from any unsocial habit that he fell into this restraint. It was because he found that the unguarded words of a public man are often given a weight they were not intended to bear. If he unbent as one might whose every word has not come to be thought of value, it led to misunderstandings. In his home and among near friends he revealed a charming readiness to engage in lively and frolicsome conversation.
Some stories illustrating his keen sense of humor, and specimens of verse written in rollicking vein for special occasions, which might not properly find place in a serious attempt at biography, I have thought might be allowed in such an informal work as this. Few of the lines I shall here give have ever appeared in any of his collected works, and some of them were never before in print. I am sure I do no wrong to his memory in thus bringing out a phase of his character which could not be fully treated in biography.
I never heard him laugh aloud, but a merrier face and an eye that twinkled with livelier glee when thoroughly amused are not often seen. He would double up with mirth without uttering a sound,—his chuckle being visible instead of audible,—but this peculiar expression of jollity was irresistibly infectious. The faculty of seeing the humorous side of things he considered a blessing to be coveted, and he had a special pity for that class of philanthropists who cannot find a laugh in the midst of the miseries they would alleviate. A laugh rested him, and any teller of good stories, any writer of lively adventures, received a hearty greeting from him. He told Dickens that his "Pickwick Papers" had for years been his remedy for insomnia, and Sam Weller had helped him to many an hour of rested nerves. He loved and admired Longfellow and Lowell, and they were his most cherished friends, but the lively wit of Holmes had a special charm for him, and jolly times they had whenever they met. The witty talk and merry letters of Gail Hamilton, full as they were of a mad revelry of nonsense, were a great delight to him. It was not in praise of but in pity for Charles Sumner that he wrote:—
"No sense of humor dropped its oil
On the hard ways his purpose went;
Small play of fancy lightened toil;
He spake alone the thing he meant."
As an illustration of his own way of speaking the thing he did not mean, just for fun, take the following: More than thirty years ago, a Division of the Sons of Temperance was organized in Amesbury, and his niece, one of his household, joined it. Her turn came to edit a paper for the Division, and she asked her uncle to contribute something. He had often complained in a laughing way in regard to the late hours of the club, and had threatened to lock her out. This accounts for the tone of the following remarkable contribution to temperance literature from one of the oldest friends of the cause:—
THE DIVISION
"Dogs take it! Still the girls are out,"
Said Muggins, bedward groping,
"'T is twelve o'clock, or thereabout,
And all the doors are open!
I'll lock the doors another night,
And give to none admission;
Better to be abed and tight
Than sober at Division!"
Next night at ten o'clock, or more
Or less, by Muggins's guessing,
He went to bolt the outside door,
And lo! the key was missing.
He muttered, scratched his head, and quick
He came to this decision:
"Here 's something new in 'rithmetic,
Subtraction by Division!
"And then," said he, "it puzzles me,
I cannot get the right on 't,
Why temperance talk and whiskey spree
Alike should make a night on 't.
D 'ye give it up?" In Muggins's voice
Was something like derision—
"It 's just because between the boys
And girls there 's no Division!"