Chapter 11: early loves and love poetry
It is hard to associate with the Whittier of maturer years a passage like this written from Boston in 1829, at the age of twenty-three;--Mr. Pickard however assures us that there are many similar passages in Whittier's early letters; and this boyish semi-sentimentalism, even if it reaches the confines of romance, has really no more perilous quality of [136] passion than has Whittier's equally unexpected “Hang me!” of profanity. What we know about the maturer Whittier is that no man has touched in a higher and simpler strain the images of beauty and the associations of youthful love. Perhaps the nearest we shall ever come to his own habitual views of matrimony as a personal application may be found in his reply to a young girl with whom he was fond of talking, and who once replied,--Here I have been all day trying to write something for my paper, but what with habitual laziness, and a lounge or two in the Athenaeum Gallery, I am altogether unfitted for composition. . . . There are a great many pretty girls at the Athenaeum, and I like to sit there and remark upon the different figures that go flitting by me, like aerial creatures just stooping down to our dull earth, to take a view of the beautiful creations of the painter's genius. I love to watch their airy motions, notice the dark brilliancy of their fine eyes, and observe the delicate flush stealing over their cheeks, but, trust me, my heart is untouched,--cold and motionless as a Jutland lake lighted up by the moonshine. I always did love a pretty girl. Heaven grant there is no harm in it! . .. Mr. Garrison will deliver an address on the Fourth of July. He goes to see his Dulcinea every other night almost, but is fearful of being ‘shipped off,’ after all, by her. Lord help the poor fellow, if it happens so. I like my business very well; but hang me if I like the people here. I am acquainted with a few girls, and have no wish to be so with many.
At which he laughed a merry laugh, vigorously smote his knee, and said, “I guess thee is about right, Mary.” Yet in reading the memoirs of poets it is impossible not to find the basis of their early inspirations, three times out of four, in some personal experience of love and romance. It is, on the other hand, an inconvenience of lifelong bachelorhood that innumerable stories arise about a man, first and last; and that however shy his personal relations with women, he only gives the more place for supposed wanderings of the heart. Whittier's elder sister, looking back from middle life, could find nothing positive to tell me of any such [137] wanderings in his case, and could only say that there had been vague reports, to which she attached no value, about “somebody at Amesbury.” The Century Magazine for May, 1902, contained what was called “a noteworthy letter” by Whittier, edited by Mr. William Lyon Phelps and addressed to Miss Cornelia Russ of Hartford, Conn., on his leaving that city on Dec. 31, 1831. It contains a proposal of an interview, apparently with a view to marriage. Mr. Pickard, his literary editor, frankly doubts the genuineness of this letter, and partly from its signature, “Yours most truly,” a loss of the Quaker form which has not other example among his early correspondence; and he also questions the correctness of its dates, because he finds Whittier to have left Hartford permanently several months earlier than the date of the letter. He also disapproves, apparently, the assumption of Mr. Phelps that the object of this letter was the person who inspired that poem of Whittier which came nearest to a love-song, “Memories.” He asserts positively that the real object of this poem was a lady of whom Mr. Pickard thus writes in a newspaper communication since the publication of his volume.‘ Mr. Whittier, you often ask me to tell you about my experiences; I think you ought to tell me about yours.’
‘Well,’ said the poet, ‘ it isn't likely, Mary, that one has lived so long as I have in the world without having had some experiences, but it isn't worth while for an old man to talk much about them. Time was when I had my dreams and fancies — but those days have long since passed -don't thee think I should have made a pretty good husband?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mary; ‘but I think if thee had wished to go to Amesbury on a certain train thee would have gone, wife or no wife.’Claflin's Reminiscences, p. 68.
She died several years ago, the widow of Judge Thomas of Covington, Ky. She was born in Haverhill, and was a distant relative of Whittier's, her maiden name being Mary Emerson Smith. Her grandmother, Mrs. Nehemiah Emerson, was a second cousin of Whittier's father. As a girl she was often at her grandfather Emerson's, and Whittier as a boy lived for a time at the same place, and attended school in that district. He called Mary's grandmother “Aunt.” Afterward they were fellow students at Haverhill Academy. When Whittier was editing the American [138] Manufacturer, in Boston, she was at a seminary at Kennebunk, Me., and they were in correspondence, which showed a warm attachment on his part. I have seen the originals of these letters. There were several considerations which forbade thought of marriage on the part of either of them. She went to Cincinnati with her uncles, about 1831, and for this reason he planned to go West in 1832, but was prevented by a prospect of being elected to Congress from the Essex district. Up to the time of her marriage to Judge Thomas, Whittier's letters to her were frequent, all written in a brotherly tone, and giving the gossip of Haverhill. In one letter, written in 1832, he refers to his just published poem, “Moll Pitcher,” and says he has in it drawn a portrait of herself. This portrait may be found on pages 26, 27, of the poem, and it is probable that the reason why “Moll Pitcher” does not appear in any collection of his works is that he used several passages of it in other and later poems. Thus, the first stanza of ‘Memories’ is copied almost verbatim from these lines in “Moll Pitcher ” :[139] Apart from these boyish traditions, the person with whom Whittier's name was most persistently attached, in the way of matrimonial predictions, was an accomplished and attractive person named Elizabeth Lloyd, whom he knew intimately in Friends' Meeting, though she afterward became, like many of the Philadelphia Friends, an Episcopalian. She, like himself, printed many poems, one of which gave her a sort of vicarious celebrity, being that entitled “Milton's prayer in Blindness,” which was taken by many to be a real production of the poet. I can well remember to have heard this theory defended by cultivated people; and the impression so far prevailed, that it was understood to have been reprinted in an English edition of Milton's “Works.” I remember well this lady at a later period during her widowhood, as Mrs. Howell; she had the remains of beauty, was dainty in her person and dress, and was very agreeable in conversation. She was invariably described as having been a personal friend of Whittier's, and was unquestionably the person mentioned by him in his poem called originally “An incident among the White Mountains,” but more recently “Mountain pictures, Monadnock from Wachusett.” 1 In later years, I fear, she was not quite loyal to his memory; and was known to criticise him as rustic, untravelled, without various experience; but she must remain in the world's memory, if at all, like so many Italian women in the past, as the possible retrospective candidate for the glory of a poet's early love. However this may be, it is deeply interesting to trace, through Whittier's earlier and later poems, this dawning of pure and high emotion. We find it first, [140] in one of his best known poems; that which Matthew Arnold recognised as “one of the perfect poems, which must live” :--A beautiful and sylph-like girl,It will be noticed that the person described in “Memories ” is remembered as a child, and this does not apply to the case of Miss Russ, as it does apply to Miss Smith. Then again, the “ hazel eyes' and ” brown tresses' belong to Miss Smith, and not, as I have understood, to the Hartford lady.
With step as soft as summer air-
With fresh, young lip and brow of pearl,
Shadowed by many a natural curl
Of unconfined and flowing hair--
With the moist eye of pitying care,
Is bending like a seraph there:
A seeming child in everything
Save in her ripening maiden charms;
As nature wears the smile of spring,
When sinking into summer's arms.
I withhold the closing verse with its moral; a thing always hard for Whittier to forego. The next example of Whittier's range of love poetry is to be found in that exquisite romance of New England life and landscape, known as “My Playmate,” of which Tennyson said justly to Mrs. Maria S. Porter, “It is a perfect poem; in some of his descriptions of scenery and wild flowers, he would rank with Wordsworth.” It interprets the associations around him and the dreams of the long past as neither Longfellow, nor Lowell, nor Holmes, could have done it; the very life of life in love-memories in the atmosphere where he was born and dwelt. Many a pilgrim has sought the arbutus at Follymill or listened to the pines on Ramoth Hill with as much affection as he would seek the haunts of Chaucer; and has felt anew the charm of the association, the rise and fall of the simple music, the skill of the cadence, the way the words fall into place, the unexplained gift by which this man who could scarcely tell one tune from another on the piano became musical by instinct when innocent early memories [142] swayed him. Note that in the whole sixteen verses the great majority of the words are monosyllables; observe how the veeries sing themselves into the line ; and how the moaning of the sea of change rushes out and prolongs itself until the revery is passed, and the same sea sweeps in and ends the dream as absolutely as that one whirling cloud of disastrous air, from the St. Pierre volcano, ended every breath of mortal life for thirty-six thousand human beings. See, again, how in the fourth verse, out of twenty-six words, every one is made monosyllabic in order that the one word “bashful” may linger and be effective; and see how in the sixth the one long word in the whole poem “uneventful” multiplies indefinitely those bereft and solitary years. Did Whittier plan those effects deliberately? Probably not, but they are there; and the most exquisite combination of sounds in Tennyson or in Mrs. Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” can only equal them. Even to Whittier, they came only in a favoured hour; and in the more continuous test of blank verse, he fails, like every modern poet since Keats, save Tennyson, alone. “ Amy Wentworth” is also one of his very best, and has the same delicate precision of sound to the ear and in the use of proper names; the house in Jaffrey Street, with its staircase and its ivy; with Elliot's green bowers and the sweet-brier, blooming on Kittery sidethe very name “side” being local. This, however, was a wholly fictitious legend, as he himself told me; and still more imaginative was his last ballad, written at the age of sixty-eight, which I quote, in preference to “My Playmate,” as less known. It has the peculiar [143] interest of having been written in answer to a challenge coming from a young lady who said to him while they were staying together at his favourite Bearcamp River, “Mr. Whittier, you never wrote a lovesong. I would like to have you try to write one for me to sing.” The next day he handed her the following, and she was the first person to set it to music &nd sing it. He evidently worked it over afterward, however, for it must have been written at the earliest in the summer of 1876, was offered to the Atlantic Monthly in February, 1877, with some expressions of doubtful confidence; was withdrawn by the author, and was finally published in the Independent in Dec. 20, 1877, with this prose letter accompanying--Still sits the schoolhouse by the road,
Within, the master's desk is seen,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry vines are creeping.
Deep-scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial;
The charcoal frescos on the wall;
It's door's worn sill, betraying
The feet that, creeping slow to school,
Went storming out to playing!
Long years ago a winter sun
Shone over it at setting;
Lit up its western window-panes,
And low eves' icy fretting.
It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving
Of one who still her steps delayed
When all the school were leaving.
For near her stood the little boy
Her childish favour singled,
His cap pulled low upon a face
Where pride and shame were mingled.
Pushing with restless feet the snow
To right and left he lingered,--
As restlessly her tiny hands
The blue-checked apron fingered. [141]
He saw her lift her eyes, he felt
The soft hand's light caressing,
And heard the tremble of her voice,
As if a fault confessing.
‘ I'm sorry that I spelt the word;
I hate to go above you:
Because,’--the brown eyes lower fell-
‘Because, you see, I love you.’
Still memory to a gray-haired man
That sweet child-face is showing.
Dear girl! the grasses on her grave
Have forty years been growing.Mrs. Fields's Whittier, p. 65.
I send, in compliance with the wish of Mr. Bowen and thyself, a ballad upon which, though not long, I have bestowed a good deal of labour. It is not exactly a Quakerly piece, nor is it didactic, and it has no moral that I know of. But it is, I think, natural, simple, and not unpoetical.Here is the ballad with its Elizabethan flavour: a ballad written at nearly three-score-and-ten, upon a day's notice:--
When in his later years, he had matured the ballad measure, he gives us also something which, as an English critic, Mr. W. J. Linton, has said “reads as if it might be from the old French, or a ballad which Dante Rossetti might have written” :--
This is in the highest degree dramatic, but the traces of individual feeling come back to us most deeply, after all, in the personal lyrics, like the following, behind which some direct private experience must, unquestionably, have stood:--
