Then when the Andover "heretic"
Reads the rhymes I dared not utter,
I fancy Josiah is scowling,
And his bronze lips seem to mutter:
"Dry up! and stop your nonsense!
The Lord who in His mercies
Once saved me from the Tories,
Preserve me now from verses!"
Bad taste in the old Continental!
Whose knowledge of verse was at best
John Rogers' farewell to his wife and
Nine children and one at the breast!
He 's treating me worse than the Hessians
He shot in the Bennington scrimmage—
Have I outlived the newspaper critic,
To be scalped by a graven image!
Perhaps, after all, I deserve it,
Since I, who was born a Quaker,
Sit here an image worshiper,
Instead of an image breaker!
In giving this picture of a poet at play, I have presented a side of Whittier's character heretofore overlooked, although to his intimate friends it was ever in evidence. I think there are few of the lovers of his verse who, if they are surprised by these revelations, will not also be pleased to become acquainted with one of his methods of recreation.
When Edmund Gosse visited this country in 1884, he called upon Mr. Whittier, and this is the impression he received of his personality: "The peculiarity of his face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with thick black eyelashes curiously curved inward. This bar of vivid black across the countenance was startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white beard and hair, offering a sort of contradiction which was surprising and presently pleasing. He struck me as very gay and cheerful, in spite of his occasional references to the passage of time and the vanishing of beloved faces. He even laughed frequently and with a childlike suddenness, but without a sound. His face had none of the immobility so frequent with very aged persons; on the contrary, waves of mood were always sparkling across his features, and leaving nothing stationary there except the narrow, high, and strangely receding forehead. His language, very fluent and easy, had an agreeable touch of the soil, an occasional rustic note in its elegant colloquialism, that seemed very pleasant and appropriate, as if it linked him naturally with the long line of sturdy ancestors of whom he was the final blossoming. In connection with his poetry, I think it would be difficult to form in the imagination a figure more appropriate to Whittier's writings than Whittier himself proved to be in the flesh."