Four American Poets

Do you know what is meant by “the love of Nature”? Yes? But are you quite sure? Think a little. It is not an easy thing to understand, and many older people than you do not know what it means.

Bryant was the great American poet of Nature. His poetry is best understood and enjoyed by those who have first learned to love Nature as he loved her. To all such it appears to be very simple and grand.

In order that we may come by easy steps to a true appreciation of Bryant’s poetry, let us take a lesson in the love of Nature.

“Man made the city, God made the country,” is the old saying. Look at the long rows of city houses: how ugly they are! How dirty are the streets, from which on windy days clouds of dust sometimes rise and almost choke you as you walk along! Even the sky above is not often clear and blue as it ought to be, but it seems filthy with smoke and soot. And what sounds you hear! The noise of the cars as they buzz and jar along the street, the monotonous roar of human traffic, and the rough words of teamsters and hackmen as they try to crowd by one another—all these grate upon the sensitive ear.

How different is everything in the country! What a clear, brilliant blue the sky is; and what a vast variety of color the surface of the earth presents!

Here is the light, fresh green of the grass, and over there are the darker greens of the pines and cedars. In the autumn we observe the gorgeous hues of the maples and the oaks as their leaves change with the frost from green to crimson and gold. Think, too, of the flowers! Here are fields white with daisies, and there are other fields filled with yellow buttercups or red clover blossoms! Farther away are fields of the graceful, slender-stalked wheat, or of the tall, rustling corn!

Have you ever been in the woods in June? Instead of the harsh sounds of the streets, you hear the tumultuous but harmonious songs of birds; instead of the steady roar of traffic, you hear the deep note of the wind through the trees, or the murmur of a little brook flowing over stones or dashing down a waterfall. All around you the trees rise, like columns in a cathedral, but more beautiful and majestic; and the air is filled with a sweet scent fit to be used for incense in the churches.

Now read what Bryant has to say in his “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood.” There are many hard words in it, and you must read very carefully and thoughtfully; but it will make you feel that on entering such a wood you are indeed going into God’s own natural church, a place even more magnificent and wonderful than Solomon’s temple:

This is one of the hardest things in Bryant’s poetry. When you can see all its beauties, and take pleasure in reading it, you will have learned to love both Nature and Nature’s poet-priest.

Every child at school becomes familiar with this grand poem, because it is in many of the higher readers. But that is not enough. You should learn to understand its meaning. As you read this poem, are you not reminded of the deep notes of a church organ, as the organist, left alone, plays some mighty fugue in preparation for the funeral of a great man? Thanatopsis (made up from two Greek words) means a view of death. The poem opens by calling to our minds the grandeurs and the beauty of a cathedral-like wood, where Nature rules supreme.

We should hardly expect a young man of seventeen to be meditating on death; but even very young people often think about it.

These are the things we all think of when father or mother or brother or sister or young friend dies and is laid away in the earth. It is sad and terrible, and we cannot help weeping. At those times strong men and women shed tears, and we do not think it strange. But, says Bryant,—

Being turned back to earth again does not seem so terrible when we think that all must have the same fate. There is a suggestion of grandeur in the thought that George Washington, King Solomon, Sir Isaac Newton, Napoleon—all lie in the same bed which Nature, the all-ruling, everlasting power, has provided.

When we reflect on how many have lived and died, the earth seems but one great tomb. There are said to be over 1,200,000,000 persons on the earth to-day. In a few years they will all have passed away, and others will have taken their places; and this change has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. In the graveyards of any city will be found but a few hundred or at most a few thousand graves; yet hundreds of thousands of people have died there and been buried. Where are their graves? Lost and forgotten.

Always of a studious turn, always reading in his father’s well-stocked library, or wandering through the woods and writing poetry, Bryant naturally tended towards some learned profession. He did not care to be a doctor; he would have liked to be a literary man, if such a career had then existed or been dreamed possible. As it was not, he finally decided to become a lawyer.

A classmate who remembers him at this time describes him as singularly handsome and finely formed. He was tall and slender, and had a prolific growth of dark brown hair. He was also quick and dextrous in his movements, so much so that his younger brother sometimes boasted about his “stout brother,” though he afterward learned that his strength was not so remarkable as his skill and alertness in the use of it.

When his father’s poverty compelled him to abandon college, he entered the law office of a Mr. Howe, of Worthington, a quiet little village four or five miles from Cummington.

Bryant’s friend and biographer, John Bigelow, says: “A young man’s first year’s study of the law commonly affects him like his first cigar or his first experience ‘before the mast.’” In other words, Bryant didn’t like it at all. He was a conscientious young man, and kept at the work; but he felt that he would almost as soon go out as a day laborer. In a letter he speaks of Worthington as consisting of “a blacksmith shop and a cow stable,” where his only entertainment was reading Irving’s “Knickerbocker.” Mr. Howe complained that he gave more time to Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads than to Blackstone and Chitty, the great authorities on law, which he should have been studying.

Young Bryant wanted to go to Boston to continue his studies; but finally, as his father was too poor to support him in Boston, he went to Bridgewater, where his grandfather, Dr. Philip Bryant, lived. He liked this place better. He was poet for a Fourth of July celebration, and became interested in politics. The War of 1812 was going on. Madison was President, and Bryant, in his letters to his friends, speaks of him as “His Imbecility.” “His Imbecility” was warned that if he imposed any more taxes the people would revolt.

At one time, Bryant thought of entering the militia for the defense of states’ rights. It seems that he then advocated the policy of Massachusetts seceding from the Union, as the Southern states afterwards did.

His father actually got him a commission as adjutant in the Massachusetts militia, but the war ended, and Bryant kept on with his law studies. That same year he came of age and was admitted to practice at the bar.

He now went home and began to look about for a place where he could begin the practice of law. He decided on Plainfield, a small village four or five miles from Cummington. Plainfield had been the home of his father for a short time when the future poet was a child; but it was a very small place, with not more than two hundred inhabitants.

He drudged here for a few months, earning quite a little money; but he decided that the place was too small, and went to Great Barrington, where he had a chance to go into partnership with a lawyer already established, whose practice was worth $1,200 a year.

Here he settled down to hard work, and here he remained as long as he continued to practice law. After the success of “Thanatopsis,” he contributed various articles to the North American Review, and in it were published some of his most famous poems. He was chosen one of the tithing men of the town, and soon afterwards town clerk, an office he held for five years. As town clerk he received a salary of five dollars a year. The governor of Massachusetts also made him Justice of the Peace.

When Bryant was twenty-five years old his father died. This caused him great grief; but about this time, great happiness came to him also. Soon after going to Great Barrington he had become acquainted with a Miss Fairchild, who was an orphan visiting in the neighborhood. He liked her, and the year after his father’s death they were married. She was his devoted wife and friend for forty-five years, until she died.

Gradually Bryant had become known in the small literary circle that had sprung up around the North American Review, though his name was not known outside this small circle in Boston. He had a great desire to become a literary man; but he knew he must support his wife and family, and verse-making offered no money return.

His friends, Richard H. Dana, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, and one or two others, tried to persuade him to go to New York and engage in literature. Finally he made a visit to New York. A publishing firm there offered him two hundred dollars a year to write one hundred lines of poetry a month for them. He thought this might keep him from starvation. He went back to Great Barrington and stayed for some time longer, contributing to the United States Literary Gazette, for which Longfellow was then writing.

In 1825 he visited New York again, and was offered the editorship of a monthly periodical, the New York Review and Athenæum Magazine, which some publishers were proposing to start. His salary was to be one thousand dollars a year. This offer he accepted, and he went to New York to live, leaving his wife and family in Great Barrington until he should find out whether he was going to succeed. He considered that if literature failed, he could drudge at the law in New York as well as at Great Barrington.

James Fenimore Cooper, who was now becoming a famous novelist, was a friend of Bryant’s. So was William Ware, who wrote a novel based on the life of Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra,—a very famous book in its day and one still worth reading. Bryant worked very hard. He liked literature a great deal better than he did the law; and though it was uncertain, he thought that fortune would favor him in the end. The magazine he edited did not succeed very well, and at the end of a year was united with another one, the New York Literary Gazette. A few months later the United States Gazette in Boston was united with the magazine which Bryant was editing, under the title, United States Review and Literary Gazette.

Bryant was allowed one quarter interest in the business and five hundred dollars a year salary. The five hundred dollars was probably all he got, and this sum was so small he could not make it support his family very well. If this magazine should succeed, he would get more money; but it did not, and Bryant really thought he would have to quit literature for law once more.

He was licensed to practice in New York; but just then fortune favored him: he was asked to do some work on the New York Evening Post. The assistant editor had gone to Cuba, and finally died there. So Bryant was soon made the assistant editor, and was allowed an interest in the paper.

At that time the paper was favorable to the federal party; but a few years later it became decidedly democratic in tone. So long as Mr. Bryant controlled it, it was an advocate of free trade and a bold champion of human liberty.

Bryant’s life work proved to be, not writing poetry, but editing a great New York daily paper. For many years he went to his office at seven o’clock every morning. He was never strong in body, and he had to take very great care of his health.

Every young reader should learn a useful lesson from him, although it is not easy to follow the rigorous mode of life he laid out for himself and followed to the end of his days. He himself tells in a letter what he did:

“I rise early at this time of the year (March), about half-past five; in summer, half an hour or even an hour earlier. Immediately, with very little encumbrance of clothing, I begin a series of exercises, for the most part designed to expand the chest, and at the same time call into action all the muscles and articulations of the body. These are performed with dumb-bells,—the very lightest, covered with flannel,—with a pole, a horizontal bar, and a light chair swung around my head. After a full hour and sometimes more passed in this manner, I bathe from head to foot. When at my place in the country, I sometimes shorten my exercise in the chamber, and, going out, occupy myself in some work which requires brisk motion. After my bath, if breakfast be not ready, I sit down to my studies till I am called. My breakfast is a simple one—hominy and milk, or, in place of hominy, brown bread, or oatmeal, or wheaten grits, and, in season, baked sweet apples. Buckwheat cakes I do not decline, nor any other article of vegetable food, but animal food I never take at breakfast. Tea and coffee I never touch at any time; sometimes I take a cup of chocolate, which has no narcotic effect, and agrees with me very well. At breakfast I often take fruit, either in its natural state or freshly stewed.

“After breakfast I occupy myself for a while with my studies, and, when in town, I walk down to the office of the Evening Post, nearly three miles distant, and after about three hours return, always walking.... In town, where I dine late, I take but two meals a day. Fruit makes a considerable part of my diet. My drink is water.

“That I may rise early, I, of course, go to bed early; in town as early as ten; in the country somewhat earlier.... I abominate drugs and narcotics, and have always carefully avoided anything which spurs nature to exertions which it would not otherwise make. Even with my food I do not take the usual condiments, such as pepper and the like.”

A man who was so conscientious about eating and drinking and going to bed and getting up in the morning, was the kind of man who would be conscientious in editing a newspaper. In Bryant’s early newspaper life a great daily paper was not so much a machine to gather news from every quarter of the globe and serve it up in a sensational style, as a medium for discussing public questions. Nowadays, people often do not even look at the editorial column; but in those days there was so little news they were obliged to read this. It was about the only fresh thing in the paper. Once a week, perhaps, a sailing vessel from Europe would come in with a bundle of European newspapers, from which the editor would clip and reprint a summary of foreign news. It took several days to get news from Washington to New York. Local items were generally sent in by friends of the editor. For years Bryant had but one assistant, and they two did all the reporting, editing, and editorial writing. Reviews of books were sometimes done outside, and the shipping and financial news was furnished by a sort of City Press Association. It was Bryant’s work to write a brilliant editorial or two every morning. Many of these were on politics, others on questions of local public interest. But Bryant tried always to be on the side of right and justice. For years the Post was regarded as the leading paper of the people, standing for the rights of the people. Many a time it fought the battles of the great public, and sometimes it won.

A daily paper lasts but for a day; then it is dead and another takes its place. To know how completely a daily paper dies when its day’s work is done, so to speak, suppose you try to buy a copy three months old, or a year old. You remember three months ago there were hundreds of thousands of copies printed and distributed. You suppose that you can get a copy at the office of the paper, at any rate. But no; all more than three months old have been destroyed.

In New York there was once a little old shop, kept by a queer old mulatto, known as “Back Number Bud,” who charged a dollar and a half for a one cent paper, less than a year old. This shop of “Back Number Bud’s” was, a few years ago, the only place in New York City where back numbers of newspapers could be purchased at any price; and in smaller cities no copies whatever could be obtained, except by chance.

A daily newspaper influences the people to-day, and then dies, and another paper takes its place. But if one man is making that paper every day for fifty years, at the end of fifty years, doing a little every day, he may have succeeded several times in completely revolutionizing public opinion.

Besides Bryant, there were other great newspaper editors in New York. One was Horace Greeley, whose name every child has heard. There were others, too. But none were more faithful than Bryant. For years his newspaper work took so much of his time that he wrote scarcely any poetry at all. But as those numbers of the Evening Post are dead and forgotten, we shall never know how much good he did during those years and years of faithful leadership.

Among the remaining important events of the poet’s life, we must first speak of the publication of his poems. In 1822, the year after his marriage and while he was trying to practice law at Great Barrington, he was invited to deliver the usual poetical address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. For this occasion he wrote the poem of “The Ages,” with which his collected works now open. This poem secured him so much reputation that he published a very small volume of his works. There were but forty-four pages, but in that small space were printed some of the finest poems Bryant ever wrote. The copies did not sell very rapidly, and Bryant’s profit was not large. When he was old and famous, a young man said to him, “I have just bought a copy of the first volume of your poems. I paid twenty dollars for it.”

“Hm!” said Bryant. “A good deal more than I got for writing it!”

Of his other poems, a large number were written for the United States Literary Gazette, and the various magazines he edited in New York. When he became editor of the Evening Post he continued to edit the United States Review and Literary Gazette, until it was discontinued. After that he assisted in editing an annual called The Talisman, which appeared regularly until 1829. To this he contributed a considerable number of poems. But now for several years he wrote but little poetry, giving all his time and energy to the newspaper.

In 1831, however, he published a second collection of his poems. There were eighty in the volume. Then he thought he would see how they would be received in England. He had a friend who knew Washington Irving. Irving was a famous writer at this time, and his publisher was John Murray, one of the greatest of English publishers. Bryant obtained an introduction to Irving by letter, and asked him to assist in getting Murray to bring out a London edition of his poems. Murray would not do it, however. But Irving admired Bryant’s work, and after a time he found another publisher who was willing to bring out the volume. He himself wrote an introduction, and dedicated the book to Rogers, the fashionable poet of England at that time. But before the book came out the publisher, a fussy old man, came to Irving and said it would never do to print in England the line,

That would be sure to offend the stolid Briton’s pride. So Irving changed the line to

Years afterward there was some controversy over this change on the part of Irving; but Irving and Bryant always remained good friends.

Other volumes of his collected poems were published from time to time after this; but they are not important. The only other great poetic work that Bryant attempted was his translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. When he translated these grand Greek poems into English blank verse he was already quite an old man. His wife had died, and he wished some regular work, aside from his paper, that would claim his thoughts. So he made it a practice to translate a few lines every day. This he kept up for a number of years, until he had translated the whole of both these long poems.

For this he probably received more money than for all his other poems put together—over seventeen thousand dollars in all.

We must next speak of his travels; for Bryant was a great traveler. His first long journey was made in 1832 to visit his brothers, who had become the proprietors of a large landed estate in Illinois. He was three weeks on the journey out. While crossing the prairies between the Mississippi River and his brothers’ plantation he met a company of Illinois volunteers, who were going to take part in the Black Hawk War. They were led by a tall, awkward, uncouth lad, whose appearance attracted Bryant’s attention, and whose conversation pleased him, it was so breezy and original. He learned many years afterward that this captain was Abraham Lincoln. When in 1860 it was proposed to nominate Lincoln for President, Lincoln came to New York to speak, and Bryant introduced him to the audience.

It was during his visit to his brothers that he wrote of

He evidently liked the West, for we have seen that later he proposed to sell out his paper and go there to live.

In 1834 he made his first trip to Europe. While he was gone he wrote letters regularly for his paper; but he traveled leisurely and enjoyed himself. He took his wife and daughters with him. He remained two years, when he was called home by the illness of the associate editor, who had charge of the paper in his absence.

After this, at various times, he visited Europe again, crossing the Atlantic in all six times. One of these journeys, made in 1857, was chiefly for Mrs. Bryant’s health. They landed at Havre, and journeyed through Belgium and Holland, France and Spain to Madrid, whence they crossed to Naples, where Mrs. Bryant was ill for four months. She recovered somewhat, but when at last they returned to the United States she was not much better. Bryant had bought the old homestead at Cummington, and had invited all his relatives from Illinois to join him in “hanging the pot.” In July, 1858, he had to notify his brothers, some of whom were already at Cummington, that his wife was too ill to go there; and on the 27th of that month she died. In regard to her death he wrote to a friend, “I lived with my wife forty-five years, and now that great blessing of my life is withdrawn, and I am like one cast out of paradise and wandering in a strange world.”

Nearly ten years before this, in 1849, he made a visit of two months to Cuba, going by way of the Carolinas and Florida. He was “received by the governor-general of Havana, and passed several days on a coffee estate at Matanzas, going then by rail to San Antonio in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked by an American engineer. He breakfasted at the inn of La Punta on rice and fresh eggs and a dish of meat. He witnessed a cock-fight, a masked ball, a murderer garroted, and slavery in some of its most inhuman phases.”

He also visited Mexico, Egypt, and the Shetland Islands, and was everywhere an interested observer of men and manners.

It is not uncommon to hear young people say, “I don’t like poetry at all. It is dry, horrid stuff, and I don’t understand it.” No doubt some of you will say or think this about Bryant’s poetry. It is true that he used a great many long, hard words; and his poems are sometimes rather solemn. What is more, they are not musical like Longfellow’s. It is said that Bryant had no ear for music. For this reason you cannot read his poetry as you do Longfellow’s, swinging along from line to line. Young people who read in the sing-song style will find that they cannot do that when they come to Bryant. At first you may think his poetry is, for this reason, not good poetry at all. Perhaps it would be better to call Bryant a prose poet instead of a musical poet. But when you get used to his prose-like poetry, you will like it if you have in you the least love of nature or natural beauty.

Take some one poem that you like and read it over and over again, until you have it almost if not quite by heart—for instance, that beautiful poem, “The Death of the Flowers,” written on the occasion of his sister’s death:

Other poems that are well worth reading many times, until you really understand and love them, are “The Waterfowl,” “Autumn Woods,” “November,” “The Gladness of Nature,” “The Past,” “To the Fringed Gentian,” “The Conqueror’s Grave,” “An Invitation to the Country,” “The Wind and the Stream,” “The Poet,” “May Evening,” “The Flood of Years,” and “Our Fellow-Worshipers.” To have mastered one of these poems is better than to have read the whole of Bryant carelessly. Take one, and read it until by very force of habit you learn to love it; and then the next poem you take up will reveal beauties which you never suspected when you first read it.

There is also a city poem of Bryant’s, “The Crowded Street,” well worth learning to love:

And here is one more short poem, which may you all remember, long after you have forgotten that you ever read this little history of the poet’s life!

You doubtless remember how Robinson Crusoe one day found footprints in the sand on the shore of his desert island. “I am not alone!” said he to himself. “Another human being has been here before me.” Soon afterward he had the good fortune to find his “man Friday.”

In geology we learn of footprints in rocks. Living beings ages ago walked on the soft sand, and that sand, lying for a long time undisturbed, was at length hardened into rock.

The poet Longfellow has left “footprints on the sands of time” in the shape of his poems, and we may say those poems are like footprints hardened into rock, which will last for ages. Many an unhappy soul, after reading the sad, sweet, beautiful verses of the “Psalm of Life,” has taken heart to go on fighting life’s battle nobly, and doing good instead of yielding to the temptation to be weak and careless.

To realize what it is to be a great poet, think of the millions of boys and girls, old and young, in the United States, and in Great Britain and other foreign countries, who have learned by heart such famous poems as “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Building of the Ship.” You, yourself, no doubt, dear reader, when you want something to memorize, turn to a volume of Longfellow’s poems. You have learned to love the poems: therefore let me introduce to you the man who first lived the poems in his own life, and you will certainly learn to love him, too.

The poet was born February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine. At the time of his birth his parents were living in Captain Stephenson’s house, Mrs. Stephenson being a sister of the elder Mr. Longfellow. But this was only temporarily, indeed only while the Stephenson family were visiting the West Indies. The Longfellows soon moved into the house of General Peleg Wadsworth, where Mrs. Longfellow had spent part of her girlhood. It is said to have been the first brick house ever built in Portland, and it was one of the finest. Here they lived until the baby grew into a man.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow belonged to a good old New England family. His father was a lawyer in Portland, Maine; his grandfather had been a schoolmaster; and his great-grandfather had been a blacksmith.

The Longfellows were most of them tall, strong men, who had been soldiers, sailors and the like, and none of them had shown the slightest talent for poetry. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was small and delicate, though he always stood very erect and was a finely formed man.

His grandfather on his mother’s side was General Peleg Wadsworth, who was once captured by the British and came near being shipped off to England; but he escaped and joined his wife and family as they were going to Boston. The poet also had an uncle Henry (for whom he was named), who had been a lieutenant with Commodore Preble and was killed at Tripoli a short time before his namesake was born. Another uncle was a second lieutenant on the frigate Constitution when it captured the British ship Guerrière in 1812.

On his mother’s side, Longfellow could trace his origin straight back to John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, who came over in the Mayflower, and whom he has made immortal in his poem of “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

In short, Longfellow belonged to quite an aristocratic family, as New England aristocracy goes, and it was a fairly wealthy family also. His father was once a member of Congress, and afterward was chosen to make the speech welcoming Lafayette when he visited Portland in 1825.

The house where Longfellow was born is still standing and is well known to the children of Portland. In the old days it was in the fashionable part of the town, facing the ocean beach. But now land has been filled in for a long distance out into the ocean, and on this new land stand the engine-house and tracks of the Grand Trunk railway. So the house is now in a very poor neighborhood.

One day a teacher in a Portland school asked her pupils if they knew where Longfellow was born.

“I know,” said a little girl. “In Patsey Connor’s bedroom.”

Many poor people lived in the house, and the room where Longfellow was born was now Patsey Connor’s bedroom; but all the children of Portland knew where it was.

Longfellow went to college when he was very young, indeed only fourteen years old. In those days the requirements for entering college were not so severe as they are now; yet they were by no means easy, and only a bright scholar could pass the examinations. Longfellow was one of the bright boys. He stood second in his class. He had an elder brother, Stephen, who entered college at that same time.

His father and grandfather were graduates of Harvard College; but as his father was then a trustee of Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, he was sent there. It happened that in the class which he entered there were several other youths who became very famous men. One was Hawthorne, the greatest American novelist; and in the class just above was Franklin Pierce, who afterwards became President of the United States. Not quite so famous as these two was another classmate of Longfellow’s, John S. C. Abbott, whose histories for young people have been only less popular than the “Rollo Books” written by his brother, Jacob Abbott, a somewhat older man.

In those days no one suspected that there were in that college men destined to become so great. Longfellow was merely an aristocratic young man who stood well in his classes and “wrote verses as a pastime.” The poet of the class was a young man named Mellen. Hawthorne was very shy and never learned his lessons. He studied in his own way, and his professors had a very good opinion of him, but he was not a good scholar.

There were in college two different kinds of students, the country boys and the city fellows. The country boys were usually rough, brown, and not very well dressed. They would lumber along the streets like farmers, as they were. It may easily be imagined that they were not rich. The lads from the seaports, on the other hand, the city fellows, had white hands and faces, were fashionably dressed, and were usually considered rich.

Longfellow was a city lad, and had plenty of money. Hawthorne was more of a country fellow. While in college the two were not intimate. Both were naturally modest and shy, and each had only a few friends with whom he associated. But some years after they left college, Hawthorne sent his first volume of stories, the “Twice-told Tales,” to Longfellow, then a professor at Harvard College, and Longfellow wrote a very kind article about it, which was published in the North American Review. It was the first worthy recognition Hawthorne had received, and he was very grateful to Longfellow. This made them warm friends, and such they remained for the rest of their lives.

During his first year Longfellow did most of his studying at home. He was doubtless a little homesick at Brunswick, at first. That town is not very far from Portland, but it took some time to get there, for in those days there were no railroads. The two Longfellow boys went up the coast in a sailing boat to a town not far from Brunswick, and from there they went by stage.

While in college young Henry had no great adventures. He was a well behaved young man, never hazed anybody, and was generally thought rather a good fellow, but not remarkable in any way. He wrote a good deal of poetry, which was printed in the United States Literary Gazette, without his name; but his cousin John Owen, then at college with him, told him to his face one day that poetry was not his forte.

One other thing remains to be said of his college life. Though rich, he was generous toward his poorer classmates, and at the same time very modest and quiet about it. Here is one case, and there are a good many others.

There was a student who had worked hard to finish his college course; but one day he received word that owing to the death of his father he would have to leave college and earn his own living; the family could spare him no more money to help him through. This was sad news to him, for he had great ambitions and hopes concerning his future career.

A friend of his, belonging to the class below Longfellow’s, went to the poet and asked him if he would not head a subscription, or do something of the kind. At this time the poet had been contributing pretty regularly to the United States Literary Gazette, and had never received any pay for it. Many of the poems had been copied in the daily and weekly papers.

He wrote a note to the editor saying that he thought he deserved in the future to be paid for his contributions. His intention was to give the money to his college mate. But the editor replied that poems were generally printed gratis, and made some vague promises.

This was a disappointment; but the classmate who tells the story, Longfellow, and his brother Stephen drew up a subscription paper, put down such sums as they could afford, and passed the document about among the college men. Enough money was raised to carry the poor fellow through his college course.

“For some reason or other,” says his cousin John Owen, “the poet never liked to speak of this act of his earlier career. He and I have talked about it, to be sure; but one day he suggested that the subject be forever dropped. It was one of his peculiar habits—always to be doing some one a favor, and to wish that it be kept a profound secret.”

When Longfellow graduated from college he was a young man of nineteen, slender, well built, and graceful. He had blue eyes and light-brown hair which he wore rather heavy about his head. In his dress he was somewhat fastidious, and afterward certain people were inclined to make fun of his variety of neckties and light vests. But he always showed the best of taste.

His father wished him to be a lawyer. But in the year that he graduated a new professorship was founded at Bowdoin, the professorship of modern languages, and he was chosen to fill it. Before that, Latin and Greek had been considered the only languages worth studying. But French, German, Italian, and Spanish were demanding attention.

The story is that, while a student in college, Longfellow had written a metrical translation of one of Horace’s odes, which he had read at a general examination. One of the examiners, the Hon. Benjamin Orr, a distinguished lawyer of Maine, was greatly struck with this translation, which seemed to him especially beautiful. He was one of the board of trustees, and when the new professorship was created he nominated the future poet, speaking of this translation as evidence of his ability to fill the position.

Longfellow was only nineteen years old, and the proposition came to him as a great surprise. As a preparation he was to be allowed to spend three years in Europe. By this time he was anxious to enter a literary career, and this seemed to be just the chance. His father consented and he prepared to set out for Europe, though he did not start until the following spring.

What his experiences were abroad, you may learn by reading “Outre-Mer.” This book is partly a story, but in reality it describes Longfellow’s journeyings through Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. He went from New York on a slow sailing vessel; but his trip was a pleasant one, and he seemed always to be lucky, as he was through life.

At last, at twenty-two, he found himself a professor in Bowdoin College, and quite a distinguished young man. His “April Day” and “Woods in Winter,” two short poems, had been copied in many newspapers, and had even got into the reading books of that day. His name was not attached to any of these, and no one thought of him as a great poet. It must be remembered that teaching was hereafter the business of his life; and a very faithful teacher he was. Up to this time, and for long afterward, he did not receive any money whatever for his poetry, though occasionally some was promised him.

He studied very hard. He knew German thoroughly well, and also French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, and even something of other modern languages. In those days people knew very little about these languages, and few supposed they had literature that was worth anything. Longfellow became a great scholar in them, however, and translated poetry from nearly all of them. If you look in his complete works you will find a great many poems marked as translations from German, or Spanish, or Swedish, or some other language. Many of these were printed in learned essays which he wrote and published in the North American Review.

He was very popular as a teacher. He seemed to the boys like one of themselves, and he was very sympathetic with them. Yet they all respected him, and treated him politely. They thought that he would some time be a famous man, and yet it seemed more as if he would be a great scholar, than a popular poet whom everybody, boys and girls as well as grown-up people, could understand and like.

Now began the finest years of Longfellow’s life. It was in the early years at the Craigie House that he wrote the “Psalm of Life” and most of his other world-famous and world-loved poems, and it was here that he enjoyed his best friendships.

When he first came to Cambridge to see about accepting the professorship, he was introduced to Charles Sumner, the great lawyer, orator, and statesman, then a young man beginning to practice law in Boston. The introduction took place in Professor Felton’s rooms, who was also about the same age, that is, under thirty, and who as a Greek scholar and the writer of Greek textbooks has become famous. Felton was a big, good-natured fellow; and he and Charles Sumner at once took a fancy to Longfellow. As soon as the poet was settled in his new home a club was formed, consisting of Longfellow, Sumner, Felton, George S. Hillard (Sumner’s law partner), and Henry R. Cleveland, who was also a teacher. These five, who called themselves “The Five of Clubs,” met usually every Saturday afternoon in Longfellow’s room, sometimes in Felton’s, and occasionally in the law offices of Sumner and Hillard in Boston. They were all ambitious, all good fellows who met for a “feast of reason,” but who nevertheless knew how to have a royal good time. These meetings were kept up regularly for several years.

It was about this time that Longfellow’s friendship for Hawthorne began.

There were many other famous people here, too, with whom Longfellow formed life-long friendships. Holmes was becoming known as a young poet as well as medical professor in Harvard College, and Lowell, then a boy, was soon to come upon the scene, and at last to take Longfellow’s professorship when Longfellow should resign.

Charles Sumner was destined to be one of the great antislavery agitators, and it was chiefly to his influence that we owe Longfellow’s poems on slavery. Longfellow was not of a very fiery nature. He did not get excited even in those hot times before the war, and Sumner had to urge him a long time before he composed the poems entitled “The Slave’s Dream,” “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” and others on slavery.

Emerson was also one of his friends, and so were several others among those who started the Brook Farm experiment. These people had taken a farm, and all had gone to live together on it, each doing a little work, and all doing a great deal of talking. Some of Emerson’s friends rather disliked Longfellow because he took no interest in this scheme, which proved a terrible failure. While he was intimate with the Brook Farm people, and always friendly as far as listening to them was concerned, he kept on the even tenor of his ways quite unmoved by their arguments.

When Longfellow went to live in Cambridge he was just thirty years old. He had not then written any of the poems that are famous to-day, but he began at once to produce most of those that we love best. A good many of them were sent to the Knickerbocker Magazine. One of them was the “Psalm of Life,” for which he was promised five dollars, which, however, was never paid him. A poem then called “Floral Astrology,” but now known as “Flowers,” was the first to have his full name attached—“Harvard College, H. W. Longfellow.” The “Psalm of Life” was signed simply “L.” Both of these poems and “The Reaper and the Flowers” (published in the same magazine in the same way, at the same price, which was never paid) had been copied into hundreds of newspapers and were public favorites without the author’s being in the least known. His friends knew Longfellow wrote the poems, but the public did not.

His cousin, John Owen, kept a bookstore in Cambridge. One day Owen went to him and told him he ought to have some of his poems printed in a little volume, and with his name. Longfellow objected to having his name appear, though he thought it might be a good idea to have the poems published if a publisher could be found. His cousin said he should like to publish them; to this Longfellow assented, but for some time refused to have his name appear. At last he said, “Well, bring them out in your own way!” That meant, with his name on the title page.

That little volume, entitled “Voices of the Night,” and including the poems still printed in Longfellow’s collected works under that title, was published in 1839, when Longfellow was thirty-two years old. It contained the “Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “The Light of Stars,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Beleaguered City,” and “Midnight Mass to the Dying Year.” There were also some translations, and a few of the poems he had published while in college.

That book made Longfellow famous as a poet. A few critics found fault with it, but not many, and hundreds of others liked it and praised it. Longfellow himself tells a pretty story of the “Psalm of Life.” “I was once riding in London,” said he, “when a laborer approached the carriage and asked, ‘Are you the writer of the “Psalm of Life?”’ ‘I am.’ ‘Will you allow me to shake hands with you?’ We clasped hands warmly. The carriage passed on, and I saw him no more; but I remember that as one of the most gratifying compliments I ever received, because it was so sincere.”

In a published letter from Charles Sumner, there is another touching story of the power this wonderful poem possesses over men.

A man who had been very unlucky, an old classmate of Sumner’s, went to his office to prove some debts in bankruptcy. Sumner asked him what he read. He replied that he read very little; that he hardly found anything that was written from the heart and was really true. “Have you read Longfellow’s Hyperion?” Sumner asked him. “Yes,” he replied, “and I admire it very much; I think it a very great book.” He then added in a very solemn manner, “I think I may say that Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’ saved me from suicide. I first found it on a scrap of newspaper, in the hands of two Irish women, soiled and worn; and I was at once touched by it.”

The Chinese translator and noted scholar, Tung Tajen, a great admirer of Longfellow, sent the poet a Chinese fan, upon which was inscribed in Chinese characters a translation of the “Psalm of Life.” The fan is one of the folding kind, and the characters are inscribed on it in vertical columns.

An Englishman serving on the staff of the American minister in China found this beautiful poem in Chinese and translated it back into English, not knowing that it had been written originally in English. Here is a verse of the translation he made. You will scarcely recognize the familiar—

The words in parenthesis were not in the Chinese and the translator supplied them to complete the sense in English.

You will remember that at the time his first wife died Longfellow was in Holland. For a long time after that he kept very much secluded, and in the “Footsteps of Angels” we have seen how deeply the thought of his first wife was impressed on his memory. But while he was traveling in Switzerland the year after her death, he met Mr. Nathan Appleton, a rich man of Boston who was traveling with his family. His daughter Frances Elizabeth was very beautiful and had many admirers. Perhaps Longfellow fell in love with her then, but if he did, it was doubtless because she seemed very cold toward him.

When he got back to Cambridge and was settled in the Craigie House, he wrote a sort of novel entitled “Hyperion,” which, like “Outre-Mer”, described his journeyings in Europe, but which also had a romantic love story, in which most people thought that the hero, Paul Flemming, a young American man of letters, was Longfellow himself and the heroine, Mary Ashburton, was Miss Appleton. In the story, Mary Ashburton refused Paul Flemming’s offer of marriage. It is not probable, however, that Longfellow said anything about love at that time; but when the novel was published and became popular it was whispered about that the young lady was very indignant.

Nevertheless, the Appletons and Longfellow had had a very pleasant time together in Europe. Once they stopped at the hotel called “The Raven.” It was in the town of Zurich. First Mr. Appleton wrote his name in the register with some compliment to the house. Then the landlord presented a very long bill, which made Mr. Appleton angry and he was vexed because he had written something complimentary to the house.

“But I have not written my name,” said Mr. Longfellow; “and, if you will allow me, I will treat the innkeeper as he deserves.”

He took the register, and this is what he wrote in it:

Longfellow went home first, and for six or seven years lived, as we have seen, in Cambridge; but later he often visited Pittsfield, where the Appleton summer mansion was and where Miss Frances Elizabeth was staying, and there she finally consented to be his wife. They were married, and Mr. Appleton bought the Craigie House and presented it to them to keep house in.

Longfellow had five children, two sons and three daughters. When the Appletons lived at Lynn, one of the sons, Charles, was tipped over while in a sailboat and of course got soaking wet. In place of his shoes Mr. Appleton gave him a pair of old slippers. Longfellow returned them later with this parody of his own “Psalm of Life”:

His daughters, who became the comfort of his old age, are beautifully referred to in the poem called “The Children’s Hour”:

In 1861, twenty years before the poet himself died, Mrs. Longfellow was burned to death. She was sitting at her library table amusing her two youngest children by making seals. A bit of the burning wax fell on her light gauze dress, which was in a moment all aflame. She cried out, and Longfellow came running from the next room and threw a rug about her; but she was so burned that she soon died, though several doctors came almost immediately. Longfellow himself was also frightfully burned, but not dangerously.

This, and the death of his other wife, were the two great sorrows of his life. Except for these two misfortunes, it would seem as though he were always fortunate, living, as it were, in a bed of roses—always successful, never poor, never discontented with his lot. But after the death of his second wife he was very gloomy for a long time.

It may be said that the sadness of the deaths of both wives made him write some of his best poems.

Three years after the death of Mrs. Longfellow, Hawthorne died.

Longfellow wrote a beautiful poem called “Hawthorne,” which closes with this stanza:

The Quaker, with his broad-brimmed hat, his queer, old-fashioned coat, and his habit of saying “thee must” and “thee must not,” was not only an honest man, but a good-natured, sensible man as well. The poet Whittier was a good Quaker, as “calm and firm and true” as the Quaker in his poem. He was also fond of children, and his best poems are about children and childhood days.

It is only a little over two hundred years since the first Quakers appeared. Whittier’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Whittier, was said to be a Huguenot by descent. He came from England, however, as a Puritan, and held various offices in the Puritan church in Salisbury and Haverhill, in northeastern Massachusetts, where he settled.

It happened that two Quakers, Joseph Peasley and Thomas Macy, who had come to Haverhill, were arrested and fined for “exhorting” on the Lord’s day. They did it in their own houses; but in those Puritan times, all the exhorting had to be done in church by regular ministers. Thomas Whittier thought these men had been treated rather unjustly, and he and others petitioned the legislature, or General Court, to pardon them. But the old Puritans thought these petitioners about as bad as the “heretics” themselves, as the Quakers were regarded, and notified them that they must take back their petition or be punished. Thomas Whittier and Christopher Hussey, though not Quakers, refused, and were deprived of their right to vote, or, as it was called, “their rights as freemen.”

Thomas Whittier was such a good, sensible man, however, that the people, although he was suspended from voting, had to ask him to help them do various things in the church; and after a while the General Court restored his “rights as a freeman.” He himself never became a Quaker, but his son married a daughter of Joseph Peasley, and so most of the Whittiers after that were Quakers. Yet there were some who were not; for history tells of a Colonel Whittier about the time of the Revolution. He could not have been a Quaker, for no good Quaker ever goes into the army.

The Quakers are a peculiar people. They do not believe in fighting or going to war on any account. They are always for peace. The poet Whittier was opposed to war, and often wrote against it; and he refused to favor the Civil War, which freed the slaves, although he had himself been for many years a great antislavery reformer, along with his friend William Lloyd Garrison. But he admits that he had a sort of diabolical liking for the army and war, and once he wrote a war poem and had it published anonymously. He thought no one would ever know who wrote it, for it didn’t sound much like a Quaker; but when he had become an old man some one did find it out, and he had to admit that he was its author.

Another thing the Quakers will not do is to swear, either in a profane way, or before a court of justice. They declare that the Scriptures say, “Swear not at all,” and that it is just as wrong to swear in court as in anger. They are not great talkers; and in meeting, if no one has anything to say that is worth saying, they think it much better to sit in silence for an hour than to listen to a dull sermon.

Your grammars will tell you that it is just as incorrect to say “thee is,” or “thee must,” as it is to say “me is,” or “him ought.” It seems strange that most of the Quakers in the world, from the earliest time, should make a grammatical blunder like this. Of course Whittier, and many others, knew it was not correct; but they said that Quakers had used this form of speech from the very first, and they would not try to change the custom.

These queer people also said they were plain, sensible folk, and therefore would not cater to the “world and the devil” by wearing fine clothes. All dressed in the same way, in what was called Quaker drab, the men with broad-brimmed beaver hats, the women with plain bonnets of black or “dove-colored” silk, unadorned with ribbons or other ornaments.

Neither did they have any music, nor indulge themselves in any unnecessary luxuries. They were sharp and shrewd, however, and as we shall see in the case of Whittier, did not forbear to have a little fun now and then.

The Puritans had revolted from the Church of England, and came to America for religious freedom. The Quakers had likewise revolted from the established forms of worship, but their belief was very different from that of the Puritans.

At first the Puritans in Massachusetts thought they would keep the Quakers out of their colony. They therefore punished severely every one who dared to come among them. They condemned four of them to death, and others they whipped and imprisoned and banished. But these persecutions did not prevent the Quakers from coming to Massachusetts, and finally the Puritans became ashamed of their intolerance, and left them to themselves.

Most people are blessed with brothers and sisters, with whom they grow up. First one and then the other is sent away to school. Soon they are all out in the world, earning livings for themselves; they get married and have families of their own; and before long they seem to forget the home of their childhood. But Whittier did not get married, and one of his sisters did not marry. He lived on the farm most of the time till he was thirty years old, when he moved with his mother and sister to Amesbury. We are therefore more than usually interested in knowing about the members of the family in which he was born.

First, there was his father. He was a plain matter-of-fact man, and did not believe in poetry; and so, in this, young Greenleaf received very little encouragement from him.

The encouragement in his poetic efforts, which the father failed to give, he got from his mother, sisters, and brother, who were all proud of him. His mother was a dear, sweet Quaker lady, as saintly as she was lovely. Her face was full and fair, and she had fine, dark eyes. She appreciated poetry and all fine and delicate sentiments, and for fifty years she was the guide, counselor, and friend of her illustrious son.

Greenleaf had a brother, Matthew Franklin, several years younger than himself, who outlived every one else in the family except the poet. He had also two sisters, the eldest of the family, and the youngest. The elder sister, Mary, married and lived in Haverhill; but the younger never married, and was the poet’s intimate friend and housekeeper until both were old. In “Snow-Bound” the reader will find this beautiful description of her, lines as sweet and beautiful as the poet ever wrote:

The poem “Snow-Bound” was written perhaps as a memorial of her. He and she had been for fifty years as loving and fond as husband and wife, but held together by a purer, more spiritual bond.

She was a poet like her brother; and to this day, in any complete edition of Whittier’s poems you will find, towards the end of the volume, “Poems by Elizabeth H. Whittier,” which he wished to be always printed with his.

In this family there were two other kindly souls. One was Uncle Moses, a brother of the poet’s father, “innocent of books, but rich in lore of fields and brooks.” The other was Aunt Mercy, Mrs. Whittier’s sister:—

Such was the Whittier family, all good Quakers, dressing in Quaker fashion, and talking in the quaint Quaker way; but they were all cheerful and ready for enjoyment, and all were fond and devoted and gentle and ambitious to live well.

It was a happy day for Whittier when his sister sent that stolen poem to the paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, for Garrison immediately took a fancy to the author. After printing the second poem sent, he learned from what part of Haverhill the poems came, and drove out fourteen miles to see the young author.

He was a neatly dressed, handsome, and affable young gentleman, and came with a lady friend. As it was a hot summer day, Whittier was at work in the fields, wearing doubtless little beside an old straw hat, a shirt, and a pair of overalls. His bashfulness made him wish to avoid seeing the fine city visitor; but his sister persuaded him. He slipped in at the back door and changed his clothes, and a long and interesting visit with Garrison followed. They became fast friends, and in later years were workers together in the cause of the slave.

Friend Whittier, the old gentleman, came into the room while the two were having their first talk, and Garrison told him he ought to send his son away to school. The old gentleman was not at all pleased by the turn affairs were taking, and told young Garrison that he ought not to put such notions into the boy’s head. As we have already said, Friend Whittier, being a matter-of-fact Quaker, did not approve of poetry anyway.

So this time passed by, and Greenleaf was kept at work on the farm. Garrison gave up his paper in Newburyport and went to Boston, and the young poet sent his verses to the Haverhill Gazette. A Mr. Thayer was the editor of this paper, and he conceived the same opinion of the lad that Garrison had. He also went to the old gentleman and urged him to give his son a classical education. An academy was to be opened in Haverhill that fall, and young Whittier could attend it and spend part of each week at home. Two years before, Greenleaf had seriously injured himself by undertaking some very hard work on the farm; indeed from this strain he suffered all his life. On account of this, his father considered the matter more favorably.

Mr. Thayer, the editor, promised to board the young man in his family; but it was a serious question as to where the small amount of money needed was to come from. There was a mortgage of $600 on the farm, and nearly all the ready money that could be obtained went to pay taxes and interest on the debt. The young man received permission to attend the academy; but he must pay his own way.

It was not an easy thing to pick up spare change in those days, as the elder Whittier well knew; but Greenleaf looked cheerfully about. An opportunity soon appeared. A hired man on his father’s farm occupied his winters in making a kind of cheap slippers, which he sold for twenty-five cents a pair. He promised to teach the young poet the art of making them. It was not hard to learn. During the winter of 1826-27 he made enough to keep him at the academy six months. He calculated so closely that he thought he would have twenty-five cents more than enough to pay his expenses of board, books, and clothes. At the end of the term, sure enough, he had that twenty-five cents left.

James F. Otis, a noted lawyer, read some of Whittier’s poems, and, like Garrison, determined to go and find him. He was told that he was a shoemaker in Haverhill. He says that he found him at work in his shoe shop, and making himself known to him, they spent the day together in wandering over the hills, and on the shores of the Merrimac River, talking about matters literary. Like Garrison, Otis later became an intimate friend of Whittier.

When the Haverhill academy was opened, Whittier was not only to become a pupil; but he contributed the ode that was sung. This gave him a sort of social send-off in the town, and henceforth he was something of a personage in Haverhill. In the year 1827 he contributed forty-seven poems to the Haverhill Gazette alone, and forty-nine in 1828.

So the young poet that William Lloyd Garrison discovered and went fourteen miles to see was beginning to become famous.

If Whittier ever had a real love affair, no one seems to have known about it. The fact is, he was not of the passionate kind. But all his life his best friends were women, and many a good woman he knew and was fond of, and he and she became real friends. And of that friendship with him, all those women, without exception, were proud indeed. In a letter written a dozen years after his school life began, he says:

“For myself, I owe much to the kind encouragement of female friends. A bashful, ignorant boy, I was favored by the kindness of a lady who saw, or thought she saw, beneath the clownish exterior something which gave promise of intellect and worth. [This was the wife of Mr. Thayer, with whom he boarded.] The powers of my own mind, the mysteries of my own spirit, were revealed to myself, only as they were called out by one of those dangerous relations called cousins, who, with all her boarding school glories upon her, condescended to smile upon my rustic simplicity. She was so learned in the, to me, more than occult mysteries of verbs and nouns, and philosophy, and botany, and mineralogy, and French, and all that, and then she had seen something of society, and could talk (an accomplishment at that time to which I could lay no claim), that on the whole I looked upon her as a being to obtain whose good opinion no effort could be too great.”

One of these young lady friends, perhaps the very cousin of whom he speaks, wrote of him years afterwards:

“He was nearly nineteen when I first saw him. He was a very handsome, distinguished-looking young man. His eyes were remarkably beautiful. He was tall, slight, and very erect; a bashful youth, but never awkward, my mother said, who was a better judge of such matters than I....

“With intimate friends he talked a great deal, and in a wonderfully interesting manner; usually earnest, and frequently playful. He had a great deal of wit. It was a family characteristic.... The influence of his Quaker bringing-up was manifest. I think it was always his endeavor

This, I say, was his steadfast endeavor, in spite of his inborn love of teasing. He was very modest, never conceited, never egotistic. One could never flatter him. I never tried, but I have seen people attempt it, and it was a signal failure. He did not flatter, but told some very wholesome and unpalatable truths.”

An amusing story is told of Whittier’s love of teasing. At the time it happened he must have been between thirty and forty. A Quaker sister named Sophronia Page, who went about preaching to little gatherings of the Friends, stopped one night at his mother’s house. As most Quaker bonnets are precisely alike, there is no way of telling them apart except by the name inside. When Sophronia Page went away she put on Mrs. Whittier’s bonnet by mistake. When she got to the next stopping place and saw the name inside, she sent the bonnet back. Whittier noticed it in a box in the hall, and thought he would have some fun with his mother.

“What does thee think Sophronia Page has done?” he asked her, sitting down.

“I don’t know, Greenleaf,” she said quietly. “What is it?”

“Something I’m much afraid she will be called up in Yearly Meeting for.”

“I hope she hasn’t been meddling with the troubles of the Friends,” said Mrs. Whittier, anxiously, referring to some church quarrels.

“Worse than that!” said the young man, while his mother got more and more excited. “She has been taking other people’s things, and has just begun to send some of them back.”

With that he went into the hall and brought back the bonnet.

“If thee were twenty years younger I would take thee over my knee!” said his mother when she saw what it was all about.

Among his other famous women friends was Mrs. Sigourney, the poetess, with whom he became acquainted in Hartford while he was editing a paper there. He also knew Lucy Larcom; and it was said at one time that he was engaged to marry Lucy Hooper, but there was no truth in this. Her death, shortly afterwards, made him feel very sad. In his poetic works you may find poems addressed to both these women.

While speaking of women we must not omit a description of that woman who was to him dearest of all women in the world, his sister Lizzie. This gifted sister Lizzie was “the pet and pride of the household, one of the rarest women, her brother’s complement, possessing all the readiness of speech and facility of intercourse which he wanted; taking easily in his presence the lead in conversation, which the poet so gladly abandoned to her, while he sat rubbing his hands and laughing at her daring sallies. She was as unlike him in person as in mind; for his dignified erectness, she had endless motion and vivacity; for his regular and handsome features, she had a long Jewish nose, so full of expression that it seemed to enhance, instead of injuring, the effect of the large and liquid eyes that glowed with merriment and sympathy behind it.... Her quick thoughts came like javelins; a saucy triumph gleamed in her great eyes; the head moved a little from side to side with the quiver of a weapon, and lo! you were transfixed.”

During his long life this sister was to Whittier more than sweetheart or wife, for she had the wit and the sympathy of all womankind in her one frail form; and Whittier knew it and depended on it for his happiness.

Young Whittier remained at Haverhill academy only two terms. We have seen that he paid for the first one by making shoes. The second he paid for by teaching school. When he went to the committee to be examined for this school he felt rather nervous; but the committee asked him only for a specimen of his handwriting, which was very neat and clear.

He decided not to go to college, because he said he wouldn’t live on the charities of others, and it would have been impossible to get through college without borrowing money of friends. Poor as he was, Whittier never borrowed money.

While in Haverhill he wrote a great many poems and articles for the local newspaper. Garrison was then in Boston editing a temperance paper. But soon he thought he had something better in view, and concluded to turn the editorship over to Whittier. Whittier accepted the position and went to Boston; but he was to edit the Manufacturer, not the Philanthropist. Both were published by the same people. This is the way he writes about his work:

“The Manufacturer goes down well, thanks to the gullibility of the public, and we are doing well, very well. Have had one or two rubs from other papers, but I have had some compliments which were quite as much as my vanity could swallow. Have tolerable good society, Mrs. Hale and her literary club, etc. I am coming out for the tariff by and by—have done something at it already—but the astonisher is yet to come! Shall blow Cambreling and McDuffie sky-high.”

Cambreling and McDuffie were politicians whom he was going to oppose.

We should hardly think that the gentle poet Whittier, Quaker as he was, would conceive the ambition to become a politician; but he was editing a political newspaper, and soon got deep into politics and liked it.

He had not been in Boston long when, his father becoming ill, he went back to the farm and remained there until the old gentleman died, in June, 1830. He spent all his time in study and writing, however, and after his father’s death he was asked to edit a political paper in Hartford, Connecticut. He didn’t know anything about Connecticut politics; but he took hold and soon learned how matters stood. Everybody liked him and he made some excellent friends there.

Of course rival political newspapers are always saying sharp things about one another. After he had been in Hartford a few weeks he opened a copy of the Catskill Recorder and saw a long article headed “John G. Whittier,” in which he was abused and ridiculed unmercifully. He hid the paper so that no one should see it, and went around in fear and trembling, thinking every one would know about it. Finally he wrote to the editor of the paper, protesting; but the editor had another paragraph, saying that, if he was as “thin-skinned” as that, he had better keep out of politics. Soon after this the New York papers, among them Bryant’s Evening Post, spoke of him and his editorship in a very complimentary manner, and he felt better.

The fact is, Whittier was a good politician. He managed affairs in Haverhill for years, and had a sort of party of his own which controlled things. Once on election day a tipsy man asked for a ride with him into town, and said that if Whittier would give him the ride he would vote for his candidate. Usually the man had voted on the other side. Whittier said, “All right,” and took him along. He supported the man to the polls, put the right ballot in his hand, and told him to vote. But the fellow was so intoxicated he was obstinate, and determined to vote the other way. At the last moment somebody handed him the wrong ballot, and he put it in the box.

There was in Haverhill district a politician who did not really belong to Whittier’s party, but who had always been elected after giving written pledges. After he had been elected in this way for several terms, and had been forced by Whittier to live up to his promises, he determined to go in without pledges. Whittier was away, and so he wrote a noncommittal letter, referring to his past record, and saying he didn’t intend to pledge himself any further. But Whittier came back in the nick of time, saw the danger, and went over to see the man, whose name was Caleb Cushing. Whittier told him he would not be elected unless he signed the desired pledges. After a while he said he would sign anything Whittier wrote. So the young politician sat down and wrote a letter, which Mr. Cushing copied and signed. It was printed as a circular and sent all around town, and Cushing was elected. Then after he was elected Whittier watched him closely, and saw that he made good the promises in that letter. Some time after, he was on the point of being made a cabinet officer by the party to which Whittier was opposed; but by the use of this letter Whittier prevented it.

It is altogether probable that Whittier would have been elected to Congress, and have had perhaps a great political career, had it not been for an act of genuine sacrifice on his part, made for the sake of right and conscience.

In 1833 Garrison pointed out to him that the country must be roused on the question of slavery. As a good Quaker, Whittier was already an abolitionist. He felt deeply the insufferable wrong that American citizens, even though black, should be slaves under the whip of a master. In an early poem he cries passionately:

When Garrison’s appeal came, Whittier was at home on the farm, having given up the editorship of the Hartford paper on account of illness. Caleb Cushing, seven years younger than he, had come home from Europe and through Whittier’s influence had been elected to Congress. Whittier’s own name was being mentioned. A life of political ambition seemed to lie open before him. But with Garrison’s appeal, he began a thorough and careful investigation of the question of slavery and its abolition in the United States. At last he wrote a pamphlet entitled “Justice and Expediency.” It was a brilliant defense of the antislavery position. This he had published at his own expense, poor as he was. When it was about ready to appear he hesitated, and considered the situation carefully. The abolitionists were a poor, despised party. If he cast in his lot with them, none of the great political parties would have anything to do with him: he must give up his political ambition, and devote himself to a cause that would require years for its success, even if it should ever succeed.

In after times a boy of fifteen, who was ambitious in a political way, came to him for advice. Whittier said that as a young man his ideal had been the life of a prominent politician. From this he had been persuaded only by the appeals of his friends—chiefly Garrison. Taking their advice, he had united with the persecuted and obscure band of abolitionists, and to this course he attributed all his after success in life. Then, turning to the boy, he placed his hand on his head, and said in his gentle voice: “My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.”

From this time on, for thirty years, Whittier continued to be a very poor man. He made antislavery speeches sometimes, edited antislavery papers, wrote antislavery poems, was secretary of antislavery societies. For all this he was paid very little, and at the same time his health was poor. He sold the farm which had been his father’s, and moved to Amesbury, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

His mother and his sister approved of his course, and supported him in every way. Their enthusiastic help made his life even pleasant. He thought nothing of poverty or hardship, but only of the great work into which he had thrown himself. At one time he thought he must mortgage his home; but a friend came to his assistance, and at last in his old age he had money and comfort and all that success brings with it.

From this time on, Whittier went through times of terrible struggle and conflict. Garrison had started his well-known paper, the Liberator, in Boston. To it Whittier contributed the poem from which we have quoted the verse on page 44. In 1835 he was elected to the legislature by his fellow townsmen of Haverhill.

While attending a special session of the legislature that year, he saw the mob which came near hanging Garrison, and saw the rope about his friend’s neck as the crowd hurried him around the corner of a street. The riot started in an attempt to break up a meeting of the Female Antislavery Society, which Whittier’s sister was attending. When he heard of the outbreak he hurried off to the rescue of his sister; but she and the other women had escaped; and the police finally saved Garrison and took him to the jail for protection.

We must now mention a few exciting events in which Whittier himself took part. At the time of the occurrences referred to in the last chapter, George Thompson, an eloquent English reformer who had helped to secure the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, came to Boston to speak against slavery in the United States. It happened that the good people of the churches thought that the easy way to remove slavery was to send the slaves back to Africa, and for this they took up collections. Garrison and Whittier came out strongly against this weak-kneed plan, and George Thompson helped them. Of course, the church folk were angry; and all the business men were angry, because they said it spoiled business to stir up this agitation. As a result, the rough characters in every town saw a chance to have sport, and did all they could to break up the meetings of abolitionists. The good church people and all the well-to-do and solid members of the community were so angry that they wouldn’t do anything to stop the mobs; and the result was that, wherever the speakers went, stones and rotten eggs were thrown at them, and abuse of all sorts was heaped upon them.

They got up a cry against George Thompson especially, that he was an Englishman who had come over to try to steal American business; for in those days Americans were very jealous of England. They said Thompson’s antislavery speeches were intended simply to stir up a quarrel between the Northern people and the Southern, so that England could step in and get their business. Handbills were thrown broadcast in Boston offering one hundred dollars to the first person that would lay violent hands on him.

The first mob was the one Whittier saw in Boston, from which his sister narrowly escaped. The rioters were after Thompson; but not finding him, they took Garrison instead.

A little later Thompson came to Haverhill and stopped with the Whittiers. He and the poet immediately set out on a tour into New Hampshire. With Thompson had come a clergyman named Samuel J. May. He was to have held a meeting one Sunday in the First Parish meeting-house in Concord, but the committee refused to allow him to speak on slavery, and another church was obtained.

At half-past seven he began to speak. Every one was listening with breathless attention, when a stone came through a window. He paid no attention, but kept steadily on. In a moment another stone came through the pulpit window, and another big one fell among the audience and frightened them so they all started for the door. Rev. Mr. May then decided to close the meeting, and called to the people to receive the benediction.

It was a good thing he did so, for the steps of the church had been taken away, and if the crowd had poured out they would have fallen headlong. A heavily loaded cannon had also been brought up, and would have been used with terrible effect had the meeting lasted much longer. Whittier’s sister took one arm of the clergyman, and another young lady the other, and they got him through the crowd without injury.

Whittier and Thompson had in the meantime gone to meet a still more violent mob. A man named George Kent arranged a meeting for them in Concord, Massachusetts, since famous as the home of Hawthorne and Emerson. Handbills were circulated announcing that George Thompson and John G. Whittier would hold a meeting “at which the principles, views, and operations of the abolitionists would be explained.” The selectmen warned the people who were promoting it that there would be trouble if they held it; but they persisted.

As the hour for the meeting approached, a great crowd gathered. The selectmen ordered that the doors should not be opened. Thereupon the crowd determined that they would find “the incendiary George Thompson,” and punish him as he deserved; and, with loud threats, they accordingly set off for the house of George Kent and his “wine cellar.”

On the way they met Whittier. They thought he was Thompson, in spite of his Quaker coat and the assurances of a gentleman who was with him that he was not the man, and began to pelt him with rotten eggs, mud, and stones. Whittier was only lamed a little; but his coat was spoiled by the decayed eggs so that he could not wear it any more. Years afterward, when clothes were being sent to the negroes in the South, he donated this coat.

At last Whittier and his companion escaped into the house of Colonel Kent, a brother of George Kent, and the colonel convinced the crowd that Thompson was not there. They therefore pushed on to the house of George Kent, where he really was. Quite a little company of antislavery people had assembled there to see Thompson, among them two nieces of Daniel Webster. But when the crowd arrived, he had left the house by a back street.

When the mob found that he was gone, they went away to celebrate with fireworks and bonfires. In the meantime Whittier, anxious for his friend, changed his hat, and escaping through the crowd went to the house of George Kent. After a time Thompson came back. So did the crowd, all the time firing guns, throwing stones, and making a great noise.

At last, early in the morning, a horse and buggy were brought around to the back door, and Thompson and Whittier got into the vehicle. Then the gates were thrown open, and, before the crowd knew what was being done, they drove away at a furious rate and escaped.

They drove fast; but the news had spread before them. They came to an inn at some distance from Concord. A number of men were telling about the riot, and exhibiting a handbill calling upon all good citizens to assist in capturing George Thompson and giving him his deserts.

“How will you recognize the rascal?” asked Whittier.

“Easily enough; he is a tonguey fellow,” said the landlord.

When they were in their carriage ready to drive away, Whittier said, “I am John G. Whittier, and this is George Thompson.”

The men stared at them until they were out of sight, but did not offer to lay hands on them.

A year or two later Whittier went to Philadelphia to edit an antislavery paper. The abolitionists had put up a large, fine building, called Pennsylvania Hall. Whittier moved his editorial office into it as soon as it was finished. A series of meetings were at once held in it; but they did not last long, for one night a mob burned the building, and of course Whittier’s office, with all his papers, was destroyed.

It is not necessary to tell all the events of those years of struggle and hardship and poverty. Whittier wrote a great many poems on slavery. A volume containing one hundred of them was published without his knowledge in 1837 by Isaac Knapp, publisher of the Liberator in Boston. It was entitled “Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between the years 1830 and 1838. By John G. Whittier.” He was in New York when it came out. It was the first edition of his poems ever published. The next year he edited a volume of antislavery poems entitled “The North Star,” only a few of which he contributed. In 1839 the financial agent of the antislavery society, Joseph Healy, published a volume of poems by Whittier. There were 180 pages in the book, half of which was devoted to poems on slavery, the remainder to miscellaneous poems.

So the years passed by, and Whittier and his friends kept up the great fight against slavery. The poet wrote hundreds of pieces, poetry and prose, which were published in all sorts of papers all over the country. Now he was at Haverhill in politics, always working for the cause of the slave, now in Philadelphia or somewhere else editing a paper; and again at his home in Amesbury recovering his health.

In the meantime the great cause to which he devoted himself moved steadily on until the Civil War came and all the negroes were set free. Whittier did not believe in war; but when it came he urged the Quakers, who were opposed to fighting, to become nurses, like the nuns and sisters of the Catholic church, and minister to the sick and wounded.

In 1857 the Atlantic Monthly was started in Boston. All the great writers of the day were to have a hand in it—Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Holmes, and others. Whittier was also invited to take part, and an edition of his collected poems was published. The Atlantic Monthly paid more for contributions than most other periodicals in those days. Whittier got fifty dollars for each poem, and had a poem published nearly every month. He was in very delicate health at this time, and was so poor that this small amount was a godsend to him. He did not attend the monthly dinners in Boston, to which all the other literary men went, for he was a Quaker and did not approve of wine and luxuries; and besides he was not well enough to go. He sent his poems, however, with modest little notes, asking Lowell if he thought they would do, and telling him not to hesitate in rejecting them if he thought them silly. He seemed always to be afraid lest his beautiful simple poems would be so simple that some people would consider them foolish.

In 1858 his mother died, and now he lived alone with his sister. She, too, died in 1864, the last year of the war, and the next year he wrote “Snow-Bound” as a sort of tribute to her memory. It was published in Boston in 1866 and at once proved very popular. Whittier made $10,000 out of the royalties on it. His great regret was that his mother and sister had not lived to enjoy the benefit of his good fortune.

Two famous poems deserve mention. One is “Barbara Frietchie.” A lady friend of Whittier heard the story in Washington, and at once said, “That is a beautiful subject for a ballad by Whittier. It is almost like a scrap of paper lying around with his signature on it.” So she wrote it out and sent it to him. Not long after that he wrote the poem, following the original story almost exactly. Some people afterward declared that it was not true; but there was certainly an old German woman who kept the Union flag waving over the rebel troops.

The other poem is “The Barefoot Boy.” Whittier wrote it in memory of his own boyhood. “For,” says he, “I was once a barefoot boy.” It pleased him very much, and he sent it up to Mr. Fields, who was then editing the Atlantic, and asked “if he thought it would do.” Mr. Fields thought it very fine, and said it must go into the edition of Whittier’s works which he was then publishing.

Whittier was now sixty years old. The struggles of war and politics were over. The dear ones he loved were dead. To amuse and relieve himself he wrote those simple, beautiful ballads, which every person has read and admired. They were among the finest things he ever did. Among them were “Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and others equally familiar. They were cheerful and happy, and some were about the days of his childhood. There was occasionally a tinge of sadness in them, but sadness mingled with hope.

Whittier’s life might have been much easier and much happier. But he had helped much in the accomplishment of a great work, and he was not one to regret all his hardships and sufferings.

Before closing this short biography we must refer briefly to one or two interesting anecdotes and circumstances. Whittier was color-blind, at least as to red and green. He could see no difference between the color of ripe strawberries and the leaves of the vine. Yellow he thought the finest color in the world, and perhaps for this reason he preferred the golden-rod.

When the Peace Jubilee was to be celebrated after the Civil War, Patrick S. Gilmore, the famous bandmaster, asked Whittier to write an ode for the occasion. He declined, and then Gilmore offered a prize to the poet who would contribute the best one. Whittier thought he would write one and send it anonymously. No notice was taken of it. Some people will point a moral to this tale by saying, “See what a reputation is!”

Whittier was very fond of pets. Once he had a gray parrot. It was trained on shipboard and would swear occasionally; but it soon fell into the quiet ways of its home. One Sunday morning, however, it got on top of the chimney while the church bells were ringing, and began to dance and scream and swear, while the poor Quakers inside the house came out and looked helplessly up at him, wondering how they would get him down. After that he fell down the chimney and remained in the soot two days. When he was discovered and taken out he was nearly starved, and died not long after.

Whittier also had a little bantam rooster which he trained to crow when he placed it at the door of his niece’s room in the morning. Every morning Whittier would push open her door and put the rooster on top of it; and the little fowl would crow lustily until his young mistress was quite awake.

One day not long after the war the Whittiers received a small box, and on opening it they were astonished to see little spikes sticking out all over. Whittier’s niece at once guessed it must be an infernal machine, and took it out and buried it in the garden. A few days after there came a letter saying a paperweight, made out of the bullets from a famous battlefield, had been sent. Then they knew it must be the thing they thought an infernal machine, and went and dug it up; and after that it always stood on the poet’s desk.

During the time of the war, Gail Hamilton, a friend of Whittier’s, embroidered a pair of slippers for him. They were in Quaker gray, but on them was pictured a fierce eagle, with a bunch of thunderbolts in one claw. He was looking knowingly around, as much as to say that if he got a good chance when nobody was looking, he would hurl those thunderbolts. This was intended as a joke on Whittier, who was a Quaker and opposed to war, but still had a good deal of the warlike spirit in him ready to break out at any moment. Whittier used to say, referring to the slippers, that Gail Hamilton was as sharp with her needle as with her tongue.

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Whittier was given a great dinner at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston. Nearly all the famous writers of the day were present. When it came the poet’s turn to respond to the address of congratulation, he said Longfellow would read a short poem he had written. He handed a paper to that poet, who read the response.

After that, his birthdays were celebrated more or less regularly, and often Whittier had to make great efforts to escape the “pilgrims” who came to Amesbury to see him. Once a party of boys from Exeter Academy started over to visit him and get his autograph. By accident they were delayed, and when they reached his house it was the dead of night and the poet was in bed. He got up, however, and gave them hospitality, writing in all their books. Before he had finished, one of the boys said, “You have written only John in my book.”

“I am afraid some of you haven’t even got as much as that,” said he drily, and took up the candle and went off to bed.

He died on the 7th of September, 1892, at the house of some friends in New Hampshire, with whom he was staying.

We cannot close this account of the life of the dearest and sweetest of poets better than by quoting his own words about himself:

Also these lines from “My Soul and I”:

Note.—The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for their kind permission to use selections from the copyrighted works of Whittier.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the humorist among American poets, always with a smile around his mouth and a twinkle in his eye, and a kindly little half-hidden joke in everything he had to say. He was a humorist of the genuine good-humored sort, the “genial Autocrat,” the kindly and obliging friend (for did he not write a poem on every possible occasion at the request of all sorts of people?) How kind, how pathetic, yet how amusing, are the sweet, quaint lines of “The Last Leaf”:

Dear Doctor Holmes! He did indeed live to be the last leaf upon the tree; but to the very end he went scattering his humorous and good-humored words among his friends wherever he was, making people happier as well as wiser, more light-hearted as well as more thoughtful, until they turned from crying to laughing. “The Last Leaf” is a little sad, notwithstanding its lightness and fun. But there is no sadness in this, the funniest poem that Holmes ever wrote:

“In the last week of August used to fall Commencement day at Cambridge,” remarks the doctor. “I remember that week well, for something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born.”

It was in the year 1809—the same year that Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, and Lincoln were born—and on August 29. There is still in existence an old and yellow almanac that belonged once to Dr. Abiel Holmes, Oliver’s father. On the page given to August the numbers of the days run down the left-hand side, 1, 2, 3, down to 28, 29, 30, 31. Opposite 29 are two little parallel lines, used as a star or mark of reference, and at the bottom of the page the two little lines are repeated, and after them is written in ink “son b.” Of course “b” stands for “born.” A few grains of black sand were scattered over the wet ink to prevent it from blotting, and some of those grains of sand may be seen glistening there to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, and the fact of his birth was thus recorded in the almanac—“son b.”

Samuel Johnson was born in 1709; or, as Holmes expresses it, “the year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English history by his birth.” It appeared to strike Holmes as a huge joke that he had been born just one hundred years after Dr. Johnson, and he amused himself by following out the parallel of their lives. Every year he used to take down his copy of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” to see what the big, wise old grumbler was doing in that year, just a hundred years before. At last, in the year 1884, when he came to the end of Johnson’s life, he said that he felt that the incubus was raised; he had outlived the ponderous parallel.

The birth of the “laughing philosopher,” as Holmes has been called, took place in a very old house in Cambridge, close to Harvard College, and made famous in his poems as “the old gambrel-roofed house.” After the battle of Lexington, General-in-chief Artemas Ward had made this house the headquarters for the rallying of the patriots, and General Warren had stopped there on his way to Bunker Hill. George Washington and other famous men in those days must often have darkened its doors.

For years it stood, this quaint old house in which Holmes was born and grew to manhood, and from which he went to Harvard College; but before he died the property was sold to the University and the house was torn down. Holmes admitted that it was “a case of justifiable domicide.” He went to pay it a last visit, and “found a ghost in each and every chamber and closet,” and to each he said a fond goodbye. When the land was leveled down he did not care to go that way again.

Oliver’s father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was an orthodox clergyman of the strictest kind. But he was nearly as good-natured as his son. He was a handsome young man, and all the girls used to say, “There goes Holmes—look!”

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson once found a letter written by his mother when she was a girl, in which she gives some gossip about Dr. Abiel. He sent it to his friend Oliver Wendell and you can imagine the doctor’s amusement when he read the following paragraph:

“Now, mamma, I am going to surprise you. Mr. Abiel Holmes, of Cambridge, whom we so kindly chalked out for Miss N. W., is going to be married and, of all folks in the world, guess who to! Miss Sally Wendell! I am sure you will not believe it. However, it is an absolute fact, for Harriet and M. Jackson told Miss P. Russell so, who told us; it has been kept secret for six weeks, nobody knows for what. I could not believe it for some time, and scarcely can now; however, it is a fact, they say.”

Evidently girls a hundred years ago wrote much as they do now.

Oliver Wendell Holmes belonged to one of the most aristocratic families of Boston, and he seemed proud of it. But he was an aristocrat of the right sort. Said he: “I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the latter is the better of the two.” He said also: “I like to see worthless rich people yield their places to deserving poor ones, who, beginning with sixpence or nothing, come out at last on Beacon street and have the sun come into their windows all the year round.”

He inherited good blood through three lines, each of which was represented in his own name. The Oliver represents his Boston “blue blood,” which came to him from both his father’s and his mother’s family. One of his ancestors was Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver, the distributor of stamps in Boston, whom the people hated so, though he was one of the richest of the old Bostonians, had coaches, a chariot, and negro slaves, as well as good sterling silver plate that exists in the Holmes and Oliver families to this day.

The Wendell stands for the old Dutch family of Wendells, who had moved from Albany to Boston, and who came originally from Embden, in East Friesland, just on the border line between Germany and the Netherlands. The Wendells are still a wealthy and influential family in Albany, solid old Dutch burghers. Two of Dr. Holmes’s Dutch ancestors were shoemakers; one was a fur trader.

Another of Holmes’s forefathers on his mother’s side was Governor Thomas Dudley, of whom the famous Cotton Mather wrote these verses:

Governor Dudley’s daughter, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, from whom Holmes was descended, was the first American poet. In 1650 she published the first volume of verse ever written by an American. It came out in London, and was entitled “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,” and so popular was it that it went through eight editions. Among the other descendants of this first American poetess were William Ellery Channing and Wendell Phillips.

The first Holmes in the genealogy was a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, London. John Holmes was born near Boston, and went in 1686 to help settle Woodstock, Connecticut. Holmes’s great-grandmother Bathsheba, the wife of David Holmes, was a most remarkable lady. She was famous as a doctor and nurse.

They tell a fine story of her daring, how once, in 1717, when the snow almost buried the houses after a terrible storm, she climbed out of the upper window of her house in Woodstock and traveled on snowshoes over hill and dale to Dudley, Massachusetts, to attend a sick woman. She was accompanied by two men, who held the ends of a long pole, while she held on in the middle.

There is another remarkable story told of her. Those were the days of Indian massacres. When the men went out to work they took their guns with them, leaving the women in the fort or garrison house.

Once the women when alone asked, “Who will go to the garden for vegetables?” Bathsheba Holmes alone dared venture out. She got her vegetables and came back, but not until years afterward did she know in what danger she had been. Then a solitary, decrepit Indian, broken in spirit, called at her door to beg for cider, promising to tell her a story if he got his drink.

She gave him the cider and he told his story. It related to the brave lady herself. He said that when she went to the garden for vegetables, on that occasion long ago, he had been hidden in the woods and had seen her, and had determined to kill her. He had bent his bow and aimed his arrow well, and in a moment he would have let it fly; but a mysterious power stayed his arm; he couldn’t shoot. When she had gone safely into the garden he called himself a coward and determined to have her life when she came out. But, as she passed on her way back to the fort, the same power stayed his arm again, and he wondered that he could not kill a squaw. He had always thought that it was the Great Spirit who held his arm and saved her life. It was in this mysterious way that God preserved the line that was finally to give us the “genial autocrat,” the “good doctor.”

Our poet’s grandfather Holmes was a captain in the French and Indian war, and a surgeon in the Revolution, dying a year or two before the close of the latter war.

So you see what a thorough aristocrat, of the true American kind, Oliver Wendell Holmes was.

Holmes, the poet, was born and brought up in a poetic town. The old, yellow, hip-roofed house stood close beside the grounds of Harvard College; and all around were homes of men who were famous or were to be famous. Cambridge has always been a quaint, quiet, peaceful, well-bred town. It stands at the back door of Boston, a half hour’s walk from that “hub of the solar system.” Elms and poplars line its streets, its houses look like rich old relics, and everywhere are evidences of comfort and culture. Imagine how George Washington and General Warren, and all the Revolutionary heroes walked up and down these streets! Already in the time of Washington many famous people had lived there; and after him came a whole procession of great men, one after another—Longfellow, Emerson, Sumner, Garrison, Motley—their names are too many to mention.

In the center of the town are the Harvard College buildings, of brick and stone, some old, some new, surrounded by broad green lawns, and some of them overrun with ivy. Then, running out from the college grounds as a hub, are streets like the spokes of a wheel. In one direction is Mount Auburn cemetery, where hundreds of the famous dead lie buried, and which is the most beautiful cemetery in the United States. In another direction are Lexington and Concord, while on another side the Charles River flows serenely along towards Boston Bay.

Everywhere about are to be seen college students and professors. Here is a dapper young man with a pointed beard—the new professor of English; there is a bent old man, white-haired, tottering in his gait—he is the famous professor of Greek. Some of the students are gay and always cracking jokes; others have deep-set eyes and shabby clothes—“plugs” the others call them, for they are very serious minded young fellows and never waste a moment of time. Then there are many more who go singing and shouting through the streets at late hours in the night, causing the people who are abed and asleep to be aroused from their slumbers only to stick their heads out of the windows and silently wish the young fellows were anywhere but in Cambridge.

Such is this famous college town; and a very enjoyable place it is to live in. A great many famous people come here to preach in the churches, or to lecture, or to speak at banquets and meetings. A great many pretty girls come here to see the sights and visit their brothers—and look at the crowds of handsome young men.

In this old college town, this young aristocrat, the descendant of patriots and governors and men of wealth and women of beauty, grew quietly up to manhood. He went to school, learned his lessons well, but not too well, never got into trouble, had a good time, and did not fret or worry about anything, or annoy anybody, even his teachers. There is a story of a famous feruling that he got—only one—and years afterward the teacher came to him to apologize. Holmes in a letter tells in his humorous way how the repentant master came and introduced himself to the now famous poet, how in an embarrassed manner he recalled old days, and finally the feruling, and then said he was sorry he had given it. Holmes declared he had richly deserved it; but the schoolmaster was glad to get away. Apologizing to a pupil for whipping him is indeed an embarrassing thing.

It was not at school, however, but in his father’s library that Oliver learned most. That room in the corner of the old house where were the dents of the British muskets, was the study, and it was filled from floor to ceiling, every wall, with books. He says he “bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father’s or grandfather’s folios.”

Beside the library, there was the old garden, which he himself has quaintly described. “There were old lilac bushes at the right of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear tree which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened, but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar specimen at best, and was set there no doubt to preach its annual sermon. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men’s sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened, and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days.

“As for the garden beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rube, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them—hyacinths pushing their green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier; tulips, coming up in the shapes of cornucopiæ; peonies, butting their blunt way through the loosened earth; lilies, roses—damask, white, blush, cinnamon; larkspurs, lupines, and gorgeous hollyhocks.

“The yellow-birds used to be very fond of some sunflowers that grew close to the pear tree with a moral. I remember their flitting about, golden in the golden light, over the golden flowers, as if they were flakes of curdled sunshine.”

Oliver had a younger brother John, who was as light of heart and full of fun as he; and gay times they had together in this quiet old town, and this old house with its books and its garden. He says that as a boy he was afraid of the tall masts of ships that used to come up the river, and he would hide his eyes from them. And he was afraid, too, of a great wooden hand, the sign of a glove-maker whose shop he sometimes passed.

So in happiness and comfort he dreamed his early years away, with his brothers and sisters and father and mother. He was like a fine, luscious pear in that old garden, ripening without rotting at the core, or yet getting hard and full of cracks.

We have already seen in one of Holmes’s letters to Phineas Barnes that while in college he was “writing poetry like mad.” In the appendix to the latest complete edition of his poems you will find some lines translated from the Æneid while he was a student at Andover, not yet sixteen years old. In college he was poet to the Hasty Pudding Club; had a poem at Exhibition, one at Commencement, and was elected class poet; besides that, he joined several classmates in a volume of satirical poems on the first regular art exhibition in Boston.

When he finished his college course he studied law for a year, though his father rather wished him to be a clergyman. Says he, “I might have been a clergyman myself, for aught I know, if a certain clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.” Think of the little smooth-voiced joker in the pulpit! In another place he says, “How grandly the procession of old clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes!” You must remember that Holmes was the son of the orthodox clergyman of Cambridge, and these were the men who exchanged pulpits with his father.

At first, as an experiment, he studied law for a year; but he did not work very hard. He was writing poetry. A paper called the Collegian was started, and he contributed twenty-five or more poems to it, among which were some of his funniest and best. “The Last Leaf” and “The Height of the Ridiculous” were among the work of that first poetic year of his. He never thought much of these poems, though some people consider them quite as good as the poems of the famous Thomas Hood, who wrote—

Because he didn’t like them, or thought them too rollicking, he did not reprint many of them. Here is one, perhaps the first of his poems ever printed with his name, which appeared in February, 1830, under the title “Runaway Ballad”:

Here is another, entitled “Romance”:

But not all his early poems were nonsense like these. One day, in the fall of 1830, he read in the Boston Advertiser a paragraph saying that the Navy Department at Washington intended to break up the frigate Constitution, which had fought so bravely in the War of 1812, and won such glory for the American people. Immediately he wrote the following poem, which stands at the beginning of his collected works:

This stirring poem was published on the next day but one, and was immediately copied into nearly every newspaper in the United States. Copies were even printed as handbills and distributed about the city of Washington. Because the people felt so badly about it, the Navy Department at last decided not to break up Old Ironsides.

Young Mr. Holmes wrote so much poetry he had little time for law during the twelve months after his graduation. So at the end of the year he gave up law and began to study medicine. At first he felt his heart come up into his throat at the sight of skeletons grinning at him from the walls; and his cheek grew pale as the hospital sheets when he passed among the sufferers and saw the dead and dying, or helped to perform a surgical operation; but after a time these things were to him as nothing, mere every-day affairs.

About the same time, too, he became a collector of rare old books. In 1833, when he had finished his medical education as far as he could at home, he went to Europe to complete his studies in the hospitals of Paris and other cities. He remained there two years and a half, and in that time he had a chance to pick up some rare and queer old volumes.

He returned a full-fledged doctor; but he seems to have felt that he had neglected poetry long enough, and soon published his first book, which is dated 1836. He had been invited to read a long and serious poem before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard, and this he made the chief poem of his little volume, including more than forty others. Beside the early humorous poems which we have already referred to, there was the well-known poem “The September Gale,” beginning,—

and ending,—

George Ticknor Curtis describes the youthful poet in the following bright paragraph:

“Dr. Holmes had then just returned from Europe. Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled humor and pathos that have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with coruscations of his peculiar genius, his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1836, delivered with a clear, ringing enunciation, which imparted to the hearers his own enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions, delighted a cultivated audience to a very uncommon degree.”

Here is another description of the reading of the same poem, which was printed in The Atlantic Monthly:

“A brilliant, airy, and spirituelle manner, varied with striking flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem,—now deeply impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up almost into an actual flight of rhapsody,—rendered the delivery of this poem a rich, nearly a dramatic, entertainment, such as we have rarely witnessed.”

Abraham Lincoln read and admired the poems in this first little volume. Once, in conversation, he remarked, “There are some quaint, queer verses, written, I think, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, entitled ‘The Last Leaf,’ one of which is to me inexpressibly touching.” He then repeated the poem from memory, and as he finished this much-admired stanza,—

he said, “For pure pathos, in my judgment, there is nothing finer than those six lines in the English language.” Perhaps Lincoln was thinking of the lonely grave of his own first love in Illinois, for he once said, “Oh, I cannot bear the thought of her lying out there with the storms beating upon her.”

Holmes, having received his degree of M.D. from Harvard College, began practicing medicine in Boston. He was young and popular, he was related to the best families, and he had the best medical education the world could give. The result was that he had plenty of practice. He didn’t believe much in giving medicine, and his doses were usually very small. He would enter the sick-room with a bright, cheerful smile on his face that of itself made the patient soon feel better. In one of his books he gives this maxim: “When visiting a patient enter the sick-room at once, without keeping the patient in the torture of suspense by discussing the case with others in another room.”

Prize medals were offered in Boston for medical essays, and in the first two years after he began practicing medicine he gained three of these medals. In 1838, after two years in Boston, he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology in Dartmouth College. He remained there two years, at the end of which time he resigned. He then came back to Boston and married the daughter of Judge Charles Jackson. He and his wife took a house in the very heart of Boston, in a little court leading out of Tremont street, and there they lived for nearly twenty years. “When he first entered that house two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own.” Those other shadows were his children, his eldest son being taller than the doctor himself. In the surrounding houses there had been sorrow and disappointment and death. “The whole drama of life was played in that stock company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling. Peace be to those walls, forever,” the professor said, “for the many pleasant years he has passed within them.”

He had two sons and a daughter. The oldest son was named Oliver Wendell, and became a judge. The other son, Edward, was also a lawyer. The daughter, named after his wife Amelia Jackson, married Mr. John Turner Sargent, and it was at her country home at Beverly Farms that Holmes spent much of his time toward the end of his life.

He practiced medicine again in Boston for seven years, when he accepted an appointment as professor of anatomy and physiology in Harvard Medical School. This professorship he held for thirty-five years, when he resigned on account of old age.

He had a beautiful country home called Canoe Place, in the Berkshire Hills, in western Massachusetts. There he spent “seven happy summer vacations, which,” he declares, “stand in his memory like the seven golden candlesticks seen in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer.” Some famous literary people lived near by, among them Herman Melville, the novelist and traveler, and not far away were Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble, and for a short time Hawthorne. The doctor’s dwelling was a modest one, he tells us,—“not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys’ playthings.” This place had come to him by inheritance from his mother.

Holmes was the poet of the occasional, if ever there was one. If anybody held a meeting about anything, and Holmes was asked to read a poem, he kindly consented to do so. Who ever heard of opening a meeting of a medical society with a poem? Yet Holmes read an original poem at many a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

It was at the yearly meeting of “the famous class of ’29” that he read his poems oftenest. Every year for sixty years, this loyal poet remained true to class traditions. A poem from Holmes was always expected, and the class always got it.

A college class is a band of friends, friends who have passed the merriest years of their lives together. They come to college from the country over, from homes poor and rich, distant and near. For four years they live together, all on an equal footing, all together blooming into manhood. Then they scatter to their various duties in the world. One is a lawyer, another a journalist, another a clergyman, another a doctor, and others are business men. Yet how can they ever forget those happy years together?

Each year all those members of the class of ’29 who could do so would come together at Commencement time to renew old memories. Some of the class were perhaps over seas and in foreign lands; some, alas! were dead. So, as the years passed by, the number grew smaller and smaller, and the gathering became sadder and sadder; yet none of them would have missed it.

The first class poem in Holmes’s works is entitled “Bill and Joe,” and begins thus:

Most of these verses are of sad memories of happy times gone forever:

But some are poems of dear friendship and pleasure at seeing friends again, like this, called “Indian Summer”:

One poem entitled “The Boys” is well worth remembering, especially the last stanzas:

During the times of the great Civil War the poems were mostly of a patriotic kind. Here, for instance, is the way he opens his poem in 1862, entitled “The Good Ship Union”:

In 1878 he wrote a poem on “The Last Survivor,” which opens with these beautiful lines:

Let us add one more verse, a humorous verse in which the joker pretends he’s not so very old:

At last, in 1889, the poems stopped, because there were so few of the class left, and the meetings were so sad. In 1891, Holmes writes to a friend: “Our old raft of eighteen-twenty-niners is going to pieces; for the first time no class-meeting is called for the 8th of January. I shall try to get the poor remnant of the class together at my house; but it is doubtful whether there is life enough left for a gathering of half a dozen. I have a very tender feeling to my coevals.”

The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes flowed like a placid river, with scarcely a ripple upon its surface. He was born and grew up and passed all his life near that “hub” he has made so famous, surrounded by throngs of friends, never visited by sorrow, always fortunate, always happy. He found amusement in everything, for he looked on the bright side of life and turned everything into humor. And at last he died, painlessly, serenely, sitting in his chair, having been up and about to the very last day. This final event—we cannot call it sad—occurred October 7, 1894. He was eighty-five years old.

We cannot better close this study of Americas most genial poet-humorist than by quoting the following appreciative and most touching lines from an English journal: