Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in Nature, but in man or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Souvenir of Emerson
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.
“THE POET OF FREEDOM.”
N a solitary farm house near Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the valley of the Merrimac, on the 17th day of December, 1807, John Greenleaf Whittier was born. Within the same town, and Amesbury, nearby, this kind and gentle man, whom all the world delights to honor for his simple and beautiful heart-songs, spent most of his life, dying at the ripe old age of nearly eighty-five, in Danvers, Massachusetts, September 7th, 1892. The only distinguishing features about his ancestors were that Thos. Whittier settled at Haverhill in 1647, and brought with him from Newberry the first hive of bees in the settlement, that they were all sturdy Quakers, lived simply, were friendly and freedom loving. The early surroundings of the farmer boy were simple and frugal. He has pictured them for us in his masterpiece, “Snowbound.” Poverty, the necessity of laboring upon the farm, the influence of Quaker traditions, his busy life, all conspired against his liberal education and literary culture. This limitation of knowledge is, however, at once to the masses his charm, and, to scholars, his one defect. It has led him to write, as no other poet could, upon the dear simplicity of New England farm life. He has written from the heart and not from the head; he has composed popular pastorals, not hymns of culture. Only such training as the district schools afforded, with a couple of years at Haverhill Academy comprised his advantages in education.
In referring to this alma mater in after years, under the spell of his muse, the poet thus writes:—