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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 1: childhood (search)
ffrage, of organised labour. In such outworks of reform he had an attitude, a training, and a sympathy which his literary friends had not. He was, in the English phrase, a poet of the people, and proved by experience that even America supplied such a function. Not in vain had he studied the essential dignity of the early New England aristocracy, as he traced the lineage of his heroine, Amy Wentworth, and paced with her the streets of Portsmouth, N. H., a region less wholly Puritan than Massachusetts:--Her home is brave in Jaffrey Street, With stately stairways worn With feet of old Colonial knights And ladies gentle-born. And on her, from the wainscot old, Ancestral faces frown,-- And this has worn the soldier's sword, And that the judge's gown. All this type of life he had studied in New England history,--none better,--but what real awe did it impose on him who had learned at his mother's knee to seek the wilderness with William Penn or to ride through the howling mobs with Ba
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 3: Whittier the politician (search)
was the situation in brief. Congressional elections had at that time to be determined, in Massachusetts, by a majority over all other candidates, not as now by a mere plurality. In the district w The important local ordeal of 1848 which resulted in the downfall of the old Whig party in Massachusetts, and the substitution of what was then called the Coalition of the Free Soil and Democratic man is Whittier. On April 24, 1850, Charles Sumner was elected United States Senator from Massachusetts, on the twenty-sixth ballot, by a majority of one. Whittier, who had taken his accustomed qarth seems sufficient for us. . . . After a long trial and much anxiety, our grand object in Massachusetts has been attained. We have sent Charles Sumner into the United States Senate,--a man physicthat place. He really did not want the office, but we forced it upon him. I am proud of old Massachusetts, and thankful that I have had an humble share in securing her so true and worthy a represen
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 4: Enlistment for life (search)
the Quaker City. Garrison's life, I. 393-94. The obstacle being removed by the generosity of Samuel E. Sewall, afterward a lifelong colaborer with Whittier in the antislavery movement, the latter went to the convention, to which he was the youngest delegate. The party travelled in stage-coaches, and Whittier doubtless felt, as did the young Keats on his first visit to the North of England, as if he were going to a tournament. Of the sixty members in the convention, twelve were from Massachusetts, and twenty-one were members of the Society of Friends. Whittier was one of the secretaries and also one of the sub-committee of three which passed their Declaration of Independence. All this shows clearly the prestige which the young man had already attained, although this again was due largely to the leader of the convention, Garrison. In a paper published in the Atlantic Monthly, forty years later (February, 1874), Whittier gave his own reminiscence of this important experience, an
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 7: Whittier as a social reformer (search)
slide. One of his points of prominence was naturally his position as a member of the Society of Friends. On the publication of the extended Memorial history of Boston, in four large volumes, in 1880, edited by the unquestioned chief among Massachusetts historians, Justin Winsor, Whittier furnished by request a poem bearing on early local history, The King's Missive. The first verse of the poem, now well known, was as follows:--Under the great hill sloping bare To cove and meadow and Commondition to which her friends had been subjected, as a sign and warning to the persecutors. Whatever of indecency there was in these cases was directly chargeable upon the atrocious persecution. At the door of the magistrates and ministers of Massachusetts must be laid the insanity of the conduct of these unfortunate women. But Boston, at least, had no voluntary Godivas. The only disrobed women in its streets were made so by Puritan sheriffs and constables, who dragged them amidst jeering c
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 8: personal qualities (search)
ry, he never found himself misplaced. The relation between himself and others rested wholly on real grounds, and could be more easily computed. Personally I met him first in 1843, when the excitement of the Latimer case still echoed through Massachusetts, and the younger abolitionists, of whom I was one, were full of the joy of eventful living. I was then nineteen, and saw the poet for the first time at an eating-house known as Campbell's, and then quite a resort for reformers of all sorts, e vanished, and I resolved to speak to him, then or never. I watched till he rose from the table; and then advancing, said with boyish enthusiasm and, I doubt not, with boyish awkwardness also, I should like to shake hands with the author of Massachusetts to Virginia. The poet, who was then, as always, one of the shyest of men, looked up as if frightened, then broke into a kindly smile, and said briefly, Thy name, friend? I gave it, we shook hands, and that was all; but to me it was like tou
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 9: Whittier at home (search)
uct Mr. Whittier from his rooms in Boston on the morning of the Music Hall convention which put Robinson forward for the defeat of Butler, and I was specially charged to place him in a conspicuous seat near the front of the platform, that all Massachusetts might see that he was with us. By dint of much entreaty and persuasion I finally prevailed. No man was better entitled to a high seat in the party sanhedrim at that time, nor more worthy to be held up as the high priest of Massachusetts RepuMassachusetts Republicanism. But the proceedings were scarcely opened when I found his chair was vacant. He had stolen away to a hiding-place beside the great organ, where he could see and hear without being discovered, and the convention from that time on, so far as its visual faculties availed, was without its poet. We have, through Mrs. Claflin, also Whittier's own reports as to his personal conversations with fellow-authors. For instance, as he was driving one day with Emerson, the latter pointed out
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 12: Whittier the poet (search)
s never a favourite theme with him, and one could easily fancy him as going to sleep, like La Fontaine, at the performance of his own opera. In his antislavery poetry he was always simple, always free from that excess or over-elaborateness of metaphor to be seen sometimes in Lowell. On the other hand he does not equal Lowell in the occasional condensation of vigorous thought into great general maxims. Lowell's Verses suggested by the present Crisis followed not long after Whittier's Massachusetts to Virginia, and, being printed anonymously, was at first attributed to the same author. Whittier's poems had even more lyric fire and produced an immediate impression even greater, but it touched universal principles less broadly, and is therefore now rarely quoted, while Lowell's Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, is immortal on the lips of successive orators. Brought up at a period when Friends disapproved of music, Whittier had no early training in t
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Index. (search)
on, the, 176. M. Mabel Martin, 165. Macaulay, T. B., quoted, 7. McKim, J. Miller, describes Whittier, 54. Maine, 53. Martineau, Dr., James, 163. Massachusetts, 3, 41, 44, 45, 50, 83, 85, 94, 110. Massachusetts Colony, 84. Massachusetts Historical Society, 83, 86, 176. Mather, Cotton, his Magnalia, mentioned, 35.Massachusetts Colony, 84. Massachusetts Historical Society, 83, 86, 176. Mather, Cotton, his Magnalia, mentioned, 35. May, Rev. Samuel J., 52, 59-62; reads Declaration, 53; mobbed, 56,57. Mead, Edwin D., 163. Melrose Abbey, 174. memories, 147-149. Merrill, John, 42. Merrimac River, 4; valley of, 53, 155. Milton, John, 139, 152; G. W. Childs gives window as memorial of, 181; Whittier writes inscription for memorial window, 182; Dr, 87, 88; addresses poem of indignation to Pius IX., 88; interest in temperance, 88, 89; his attitude toward reform, 89,90; supports woman suffrage, 91-93; his Massachusetts to Virginia, mentioned, 95; compared with Garrison, 95, 96; his generosity 96-98; his kindness, 98, 99; moral effect of his poems, 99, 100; acquaintance with a