United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We have had no more purely American poet than Mr. Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been so true to the present. At the close of his poem Mr.
Matthew Arnold went to see him upon his arrival in this country, and it is needless to say that Whittier derived sincere pleasure from the visit; but Arnold's delightful recognition of Whittier's "In School Days" as one of the perfect poems which must live, gave him fresh assurance of fulfilled purpose in existence.
At Whittier we got into one of the newly constructed county highways, and at 3:30 p. m. we were home again, after four days in the open, four days of pure and unadulterated happiness. A Hunting Trip in the Long Ago One of the disadvantages of old age, even advancing years, is the pleasure we lose in anticipating future events.
Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery.
"Unshrinking from the storm, Well have ye borne your part, With woman's fragile form, But more than manhood's heart" Whittier The observation is no less true than trite, that no one knows till he has tried it, what he can do or endure.
I suppose she was secretly pleased by this rude homage of the vulgar, but no one knew better that the approval of her friends Weiss and Whittier was worth the whole of it. Meanwhile social life at Appledore had risen to a height. Mrs. Thaxter welcomed every one who had a claim upon her recognition.
There was a panic, of course, and the Abolition lecturer would have been roughly handled by the mob if a young lady, a sister of the poet Whittier, had not taken him by the arm, and walked with him through the astonished crowd. They did not feel like attacking a woman. There was nothing unusual, except the part performed by the young lady, in the affair described in the foregoing narrative.
Just before we went to Anderson, a neighbor lady wanted to see the cancer and the sight of it made her so sick she was in bed for two days. And through it all my wife never once complained. On the last evening of a meeting I was holding in Whittier, California, a man came to me telling me of a sick lady who wanted me to come and pray for her.
Thus General Grant sketched on an improvised map the exact spot where General Lee surrendered to him; Longfellow told him how he came to write "Excelsior"; Whittier told the story of "The Barefoot Boy"; Tennyson wrote out a stanza or two of "The Brook," upon condition that Edward would not again use the word "awful," which the poet said "is slang for 'very," and "I hate slang."
His standards were often different from those of his friends, but their ideals were on the whole made in common. His friends were to Whittier, more than to most men, an unfailing source of daily happiness and gratitude. With the advance of years, and the death of his unmarried sister, his friends became all in all to him.
Word Of The Day