There is clearly but a narrow step between these marvels and the alleged facts of spiritualism about which his placid old mother was so interested that she never failed, whenever I called there, to look up from her knitting after a while and say, “Friend Higginson, hast thee heard anything lately about these spiritual communications of which I hear?” the place where I then resided having been the scene of some reported marvels. Whittier also approached them in a guarded way, but without any very positive interest. He wrote once to Mrs. Fields, in regard to a poem she had sent him :--[126] pause, a woman stood up and said, “I am the person,” and while weeping hysterically, she confessed that she had wilfully slandered the dead girl. The friend departed on his homeward way. Such, said Mr. Whittier, was the leading of the Inner Light.
Claflin's Recollections, p. 31.
Judge Gate also writes me in regard to Whittier's supposed interest in “spiritual manifestations,” as follows:--The poem is solemn and tender; it is as if a wind from the Unseen World blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow is sweeter than that of gladness — a holy fear mingled with a holier hope. For myself, my hope is always associated with dread, like the glowing of a star through mist. I feel, indeed, that Love is victorious, that there is no dark it cannot light, no depth it cannot reach; but I imagine that, between the Seen and the Unseen, there is a sort of neutral ground, a land of shadow and mystery, of strange voices and undistinguished forms. There are some, as Charles Lamb says, “who stalk into futurity on stilts,” without awe or self-distrust.
Mrs. Fields's Whittier, p. 91.
