During his last years the poet, who was almost seventy-three years old when he died, was in a state of half-paralysis. He got out of doors regularly in fair weather, much enjoyed the Delaware River, was a great frequenter of the Camden and Philadelphia Ferry, and was occasionally seen sauntering along Chestnut or Market Streets in the latter city. He had a curious sort of public sociability, talking with black and white, high and low, male and female, old and young, of all grades. He gave a word or two of friendly recognition, or a nod or smile, to each. Yet he was by no means a marked talker or logician anywhere. I know an old book-stand man who always spoke of him as Socrates. But in one respect the likeness was entirely deficient. Whitman never argued, disputed, or held or invited a cross-questioning bout with any human being.

Through his paralysis, poverty, the embezzlement of book-agents (1874-1876), the incredible slanders and misconstructions that followed him through life, and the quite complete failure of his book from a worldly and financial point of view, his splendid fund of personal equanimity and good spirits remained inexhaustible, and was to the end of his life amid bodily helplessness and a most meagre income, vigorous and radiant as ever.

George Selwyn.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
AT AMESBURY

Nearly all the likenesses of Mr. Whittier with which the present public is familiar, represent an aged man, albeit with a fire flashing in the eye and illuminating the countenance, like that fire which underlies the snows of Hecla. But if, after having passed eighty, his face was still so strong and radiant, in his youth it must have had a singular beauty, and he kept until the last that eye of the Black Bachelder, a glint of which was to be seen in the eye of Daniel Webster, and possibly, tradition says, in that of Hawthorne and of Cushing. At any rate, he showed a fair inheritance of the strength of will and purpose of that strange hero of song and romance, his Bachelder ancestor.

But other strains, as interesting as the old preacher’s, are to be found in Whittier’s ancestry. One of his grandmothers was a Greenleaf, whence his second name, and she is said to have been descended from a Huguenot family of the name of Feuillevert, who translated their name on reaching our shores (as the custom still is with many of our French and Canadian settlers,) to Greenleaf. The poet himself says:

The name the Gallic exile bore,
St. Malo, from thy ancient mart,
Became upon our western shore
Greenleaf, for Feuillevert.

To the artistic imagination, that likes in everything a reason for its being, there is something satisfactory in the thought of Huguenot blood in Whittier’s veins; and one sees something more than coincidence in the fact that on the Greenleaf coat-of-arms is both a warrior’s helmet and a dove bearing an olive-leaf in its mouth. Among the Greenleafs was one of Cromwell’s Lieutenants; and thus on two sides we find our martial poet born of people who suffered for conscience’ sake, as he himself did for full forty years of his manhood. The scion of such a race—how could he pursue any other path than that which opened before him to smite Armageddon; and yet the grandson of Thomas Whittier, of Haverhill, who refused the protection of the blockhouse, and, faithful to his tenets, had the red man to friend, in the days when the war-whoop heralded massacre to right and left—the grandson of this old Quaker, we say, must have felt some strange stirrings of spirit against spirit, within him, as the man of peace contended with the man of war, and the man of war blew out strains before which the towers of slavery’s dark fortress fell. For Whittier was not only the trumpeter of the Abolitionists, in those dark but splendid days of fighting positive and tangible wrong: he was the very trumpet itself, and he must have felt sometimes that the breath of the Lord blew through him.

They are terrible days to look back upon, the period of that long, fierce struggle beneath a cloud of obloquy and outrage; but to those who lived in that cloud it was lined with light, and in all our sorrows there was the joy of struggle and of brotherhood, of eloquence and poetry and song, and the greater joy yet of knowing that all the forces of the universe must be fighting on the side of right.