In one of his earlier essays Mr. Whittier tells the following romantic story: "Whoever has seen Great Pond, in the East Parish of Haverhill, has seen one of the very loveliest of the thousand little lakes or ponds of New England. With its soft slopes of greenest verdure—its white and sparkling sand-rim—its southern hem of pine and maple, mirrored with spray and leaf in the glassy water—its graceful hill-sentinels round about, white with the orchard-bloom of spring, or tasselled with the corn of autumn—its long sweep of blue waters, broken here and there by picturesque headlands,—it would seem a spot, of all others, where spirits of evil must shrink, rebuked and abashed, from the presence of the beautiful. Yet here, too, has the shadow of the supernatural fallen. A lady of my acquaintance, a staid, unimaginative church-member, states that a few years ago she was standing in the angle formed by two roads, one of which traverses the pond-shore, the other leading over the hill which rises abruptly from the water. It was a warm summer evening, just at sunset. She was startled by the appearance of a horse and cart of the kind used a century ago in New England, driving rapidly down the steep hillside, and crossing the wall a few yards before her, without noise or displacing of a stone. The driver sat sternly erect, with a fierce countenance; grasping the reins tightly, and looking neither to the right nor the left. Behind the cart, and apparently lashed to it, was a woman of gigantic size, her countenance convulsed with a blended expression of rage and agony, writhing and struggling, like Laocoön in the folds of the serpent." The mysterious cart moved across the street, and disappeared at the margin of the pond.
The two miles of road that separate Kenoza from the old Whittier homestead form a lonely stretch, passing between high hills rolled back on either side in wolds that show against the sky. The homestead is situated at the junction of the main road to Amesbury and a cross-road to Plaistow. It is as wild and lonely a place as Craigen-puttock,—the hills shutting down all around, so that there is absolutely no prospect in any direction, and no other house visible. But so much the better for meditation. "The Children of the Light" need only their own souls to commune with. The expression that rose continually to the author's lips on visiting this place was a line from "Snow-Bound,"—
"A universe of sky and snow."
Not that the time was winter, but that the locality explained the line so vividly,—better than any commentary could do. Locality exercises a great influence on a poet's genius. Whitman, for example, has always lived by the sea, and he is the poet of the infinite. Whittier was born, and passed his boyhood and youth, in a green, sunken pocket of the inland hills, and he became the poet of the heart and the home. The one poet wrestled with the waves of the sea and the waves of humanity in great cities; the other lived the simple, quiet life of a farmer, loving his mother, his sister, his Quaker sect, freedom, and his own hearth. Both are as lowly in origin as Carlyle or Burns.
Between the front door of the old homestead and the road rises a grassy, wooded bank, at the foot of which flows a little amber-colored brook. The brook is mentioned in "Snow-Bound":—
"We minded that the sharpest ear
The buried brooklet could not hear,
The music of whose liquid lip
Had been to us companionship,
And, in our lonely life, had grown
To have an almost human tone."
Across the road is the barn. The house is very plain, and not very large. Entering the front door you are in a small entry with a steep, quaint, little staircase. On the right is the parlor where Whittier wrote. In the tiny, low-studded room on the left, he was born, and in the same room his father and "Uncle Moses" died. The room is about fourteen by fourteen feet, is partly wainscoted, has a fireplace and three windows.
All the windows in the house have small panes, nine in the upper and six in the lower sash. The building is supposed to be two hundred and twelve years old. The kitchen is, of course, the great attraction. Let us suppose that it is winter, and that we are all cosily seated around the blazing fireplace. Now, let us talk over together the old days and scenes. The best picture of the inner life of the Quaker farmer's family can of course be had in "Snow-Bound,"—a little idyl as delicate, spontaneous, and true to nature in its limnings as a minute frost-picture on a pane of glass, or the fairy landscape richly mirrored in the film of a water-bubble. After such a picture, painted by the poet himself, it only remains for the writer to give a few supplementary touches here and there. The old kitchen, although diminished in size by a dividing partition, is otherwise almost unchanged. It is a cosey old room, with its fireplace, and huge breadth of chimney with inset cupboards and oven and mantelpiece. Above the mantel is the nail where hung the old bull's-eye watch. Set into one side of the kitchen is the cupboard where the pewter plates and platters were ranged; and here upon the wall is the circle worn by the "old brass warming-pan, which formerly shone like a setting moon against the wall of the kitchen":—
"Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed,
The house-dog on his paws outspread,
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood."