[
110]
Mr. Whittier was self-contained.
In the company of persons whom he did not care for — who could not draw him out — his mind seemed to furnish him with almost nothing to say. He had no small talk.
Where there was nothing in common he could be as remote and silent as a mountain peak .... For himself, he was transparent in his expressions and he sought the communion of those only who met him on his own ground.
Insincerity was incivility ....
He could no more face a mixed company than he could face an audience.
It was the lack of touch — of correlation --that seemed to disturb him. Miss Bremer said of him that he could cheerfully confront martyrdom, but shrank from the ordinary requirements of social intercourse ....
Later, in 1882, when I was a member of the Republican State Central Committee, I was designated to conduct 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 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 a small, unpainted house by the roadside, and said:--
“ There lives an old Calvinist in that house, and she says she prays for me every day. I am glad she does.
I pray for ”
