17 December: Boreham on John Greenleaf Whittier

A Quaker Minstrel
The people of New England are unlikely to forget that this is the birthday of John Greenleaf Whittier. They have every justification for their pride. A farm boy of New England, Whittier was poorly educated. His father held that too much book learning was bad for young people. It made them turn up their noses at the plough, the reaping-hook, and the milk cans. He insisted that the cultivated field, the green woods, and the open-air can teach everything that a young farmer really needs to know. A casual and unromantic incident shattered the tranquillity of the farm lad's career. A wandering pedlar arrived one evening at the door of the homestead and, in keeping with the traditional hospitality of the Whittiers, was invited to stay the night. After supper he delighted the family by singing some of the songs of Robert Burns. John sat spellbound; the Scottish bard captivated his youthful fancy at once.

Shortly afterwards the village schoolmaster, Joshua Coffin, dropped in, brought a copy of Burns with him and lent it to John. In its pages he made a sensational discovery. "I found," he says, "that the things out of which poems came were not, as I had imagined, somewhere far off in a world lying outside my own sky. They were right here about my feet among people I knew!" A wild fancy seized his mind that it might be possible for him to do for New England what Burns had done for Scotland. In odd moments he scrawled pencilled jingles on scraps of waste paper. His sister found them and sent them, without consulting him, to Lloyd Garrison, then the editor of the local paper, and the following week John stood dumbfounded at beholding one of his own poems in all the bravery of type. With the printing of that boyish verse a minstrelsy was inaugurated whose echoes will vibrate as long as literature lasts.

Staunch Supporter Of Abolition Of Slavery
During the years that followed Whittier cut a great figure in his country's history. Nature and self-culture combined to endow him with a striking and commanding appearance. He was tall, dark, handsome, with raven hair and black flashing eyes. He had, as one of his colleagues put it, the reticence and presence of an Arab chief and the eye of an eagle. At the age of 28 he entered the Legislature of Massachusetts and, during the fevered years in which America was convulsed by the question whether the slaves should be freed, Lloyd Garrison—now the leader of the abolitionists—found no ally more staunch, more able, or more effective than he. He became one of the most attractive, most honoured and most beloved figures in the public life of the Western World. Strangely enough he never married.

He loved all pretty things—pretty girls particularly. He tells us how he revelled in admiring the charms of the women who passed him on the street. "They go flitting by me," he says, "like aerial creatures just stooping to our dull earth. I delight in their graceful movements, notice the dark brilliancy of their fine eyes, and observe the delicate flush stealing over their cheeks, but my heart is untouched—cold and motionless as a Jutland lake in the moonlight. Yet I always loved a pretty girl. Heaven grant there is no harm in it!" To the end of his days, and he lived to be 85, he treated all women with the utmost courtliness and reverence. He understood women as few men can claim to do, and women understood, admired and ministered to him. The majority of his intimate friends were of the gentler sex, yet, though he often expressed to those who were most deeply in his confidence a desire for marriage, its felicities persistently evaded him.

Poesy That Unites People Of All Nations
To most of us Whittier will always represent the articulation of all that is simplest and sweetest in our faith. In how many thousands of churches, churches of every creed and kind, do devout hearts raise every Sunday his beautiful "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" and other hymns of universal appeal? Thus the Quaker becomes the Priest, leading the dusty hearts of men into those holy places in which they touch the intangible, sense the incomprehensible, hear the inaudible, see the invisible, and bow penitently and adoringly in the silence ineffable. His later years were marked by the ripening and mellowing of those chivalrous qualities that had adorned his entire career. Sir Edmund Gosse visited him as he neared the end and was deeply affected by his gentle sweetness and dignified courtesy. His spirit was gay and cheerful, his language fluent and graceful. In that charming retreat overlooking the sparkling waters of the Merrimac, with nothing but green hills and bright flowers about him, he passed quietly away, murmuring, as he gently raised his hand at the last, "Love . . . love to all the world!"

According to Quaker custom, a plain slab marks his resting-place, similar to the stern and unpretentious stones erected to the memory of the other Whittiers nearby. Of that unostentatious memorial Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

Lift from its quarried edge a flawless stone,
Smooth the green turf and bid the tablet rise,
And on its snow-white surface carve alone
These words—he needs none other—
Here Whittier lies!

Up among the malarial bogs of the African jungle, David Livingstone, in his last lonely days, revelled in the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, and in doing so he becomes the distinguished representative of that great host who love to offer the tribute of their homage at that modest Quaker shrine at Amesbury in New England.

F W Boreham

Image: John Greenleaf Whittier