is a miniature on ivory of a beautiful girl
of seventeen, crowned with roses. This is Evelina Bray of Marblehead, a
classmate of Whittier's at the Academy in the year 1827, when this
portrait was painted. But for adverse circumstances, the school
acquaintance which led to a warm attachment between them might have
resulted in marriage. But the case was hopeless from the first. He was
but nineteen years old, and she seventeen. On both sides the families
opposed the match. Among the Quakers marriage "outside of society" was
not to be thought of in those days; in his case it would mean the
breaking up of a family circle dependent on him, and a severance from
his loved mother and sister. This same reason prevented the ripening of
other attachments in later life; for in each case his choice would
have been "out of society." Two or three years after they parted at the
close of an Academy term, he walked from Salem to Marblehead before
breakfast on a June morning, to see his schoolmate. He was then editing
the "American Manufacturer," in Boston. She could not invite him in,
and they walked to the old ruined fort, and sat on the rocks
overlooking the beautiful harbor. This meeting is commemorated in three
stanzas of one of the loveliest of his poems, "A Sea Dream"--a poem, by
the way, not as a whole referring to Marblehead or to the friend of his
youth. But I have good authority for the statement that these three
stanzas refer directly to the Marblehead incident. All who are familiar
with the locality will recognize it in these verses:--

[Illustration: WHITTIER, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-TWO]

"The waves are glad in breeze and sun,
The rocks are fringed with foam;
I walk once more a haunted shore,
A stranger, yet at home,
A land of dreams I roam.

"Is this the wind, the soft sea-wind
That stirred thy locks of brown?
Are these the rocks whose mosses knew
The trail of thy light gown,
Where boy and girl sat down?

"I see the gray fort's broken wall,
The boats that rock below;
And, out at sea, the passing sails
We saw so long ago
Rose-red in morning's glow."

With a single exception, these schoolmates did not meet again for more
than fifty years, and Whittier was never aware of this exception. In
middle life, when the poet was editing the "Pennsylvania Freeman," and
Miss Bray was engaged with Catherine Beecher in educational work, they
once happene