hough he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I
myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though
afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be
who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second
meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had then lately
appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in
its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker
descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of),
and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into
which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He
thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep
it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own
some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who
were Foes to good manners.

Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some
others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out
of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last
over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not
that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the
divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was
like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It
was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the
passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances,
but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and
flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery
pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England
poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of
these pieces make his place secure.

There is great inequality in his work, and I felt