"Touched by a light that hath no name,
A glory never sung,
Aloft on sky and mountain wall
Are God's great pictures hung.
How changed the summits vast and old!
No longer granite-browed,
They melt in rosy mist; the rock
Is softer than the cloud;
The valley holds its breath; no leaf
Of all its elms is twirled:
The silence of eternity
Seems falling on the world."
The Bearcamp River House (now no more) was a hostelry whose site, antique hospitality, and eminent guests were every whit as worthy to be embalmed in lasting verse as were those of the Wayside Inn of Sudbury. Before the red, crackling flames of its huge fireplace such literary characters as Whittier, Gail Hamilton, Lucy Larcom, and Hiram Rich used to gather on chill summer evenings for the kind of talks that only a wood fire can inspire. The Quaker poet is a charming conversationalist, and can tell a story as capitally as he can write one. He has a goodly répertoire of ghost tales and legends of the marvellous. One of his best stories is about a scene that took place in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, when the court remanded a negro to slavery. The poet says that an old sailor who was present became so infuriated by the spectacle that he made the air blue with oaths uttered in seven different languages.[16]
December 17, 1877, was the poet's seventieth birthday, and the occasion was celebrated in a twofold manner, namely, by a Whittier Tribute in the Literary World, and by a Whittier Banquet given at the Hotel Brunswick, in Boston, by Messrs. H. O. Houghton and Co., the publishers of Whittier's works. The Literary World tribute contained poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, E. C. Stedman, O. W. Holmes, William Lloyd Garrison, and others. Mr. Longfellow's poem, "The Three Silences," is one of unusual beauty.
THE THREE SILENCES OF MOLINOS.
"Three Silences there are: the first of speech,
The second of desire, the third of thought;
This is the lore a Spanish monk, distraught
With dreams and visions, was the first to teach.
These Silences, commingling each with each
Made up the perfect Silence, that he sought
And prayed for, and wherein at times he caught
Mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach.
O thou, whose daily life anticipates
The life to come, and in whose thought and word
The spiritual world preponderates,
Hermit of Amesbury! thou too hast heard
Voices and melodies from beyond the gates,
And speakest only when thy soul is stirred!"
There were letters from the poet Bryant, the historian George Bancroft, Colonel T. W. Higginson, and Mrs. H. B. Stowe; and there was a pleasant description of the Danvers home by Charles B. Rice. Mr. Whittier's "Response" was published in the January number of the paper:—
"Beside that milestone where the level sun,
Nigh unto setting, sheds his last, low rays
On word and work irrevocably done,
Life's blending threads of good and ill outspun,
I hear, O friends! your words of cheer and praise,
Half doubtful if myself or otherwise.
Like him who, in the old Arabian joke,
A beggar slept and crowned Caliph woke."
The anniversary of the founding of the Atlantic Monthly happening to be synchronous with Whittier's birthday, the publishers determined to make a double festival of the occasion. The gathering at the Hotel Brunswick was a brilliant one, and the invitations were not limited by any clique or any sectional lines.
In this same month the admirers of Mr. Whittier in Haverhill, Newburyport, and neighboring towns, formed a Whittier Club, its annual meetings to be held on December 17.