meeting-house, in which Whitefield preached, and under the
pulpit of which his bones are deposited. Whitefield died in the house
next to Garrison's birthplace. The ancient Coffin house, built in 1645,
the home of Joshua Coffin, to whom Whittier addressed his poem "To My
Old Schoolmaster," is on High Street, about half a mile below State
Street. Whittier's cousins, Joseph and Gertrude Cartland, with whom he
spent a large part of the last year of his life, lived at No. 244 High
Street, at the corner of Broad.

WHITTIER'S SENSE OF HUMOR

III

WHITTIER'S SENSE OF HUMOR

Few men of his day, of equal prominence, have been so greatly
misunderstood as Whittier by the public which knows him only by the
writings he allowed to be published. These reveal him on the one hand
as an earnest reformer bitterly denouncing the sins of a guilty people,
and on the other as a prophet of God, with a message of cheer to those
who turn them from their evil ways. While slavery existed, he lashed
the institution with a whip of scorpions, and in later years, in poems
of exquisite sweetness, he sang of "The Eternal Goodness," and brought
words of consolation and hope to despairing souls. In the popular mind
there has been built up for him a reputation for extreme seriousness
and even severity. To be sure, some of the poems in his collected works
have witty and even merry lines, but they usually have a serious
purpose. The real fun and frolic of his nature were known only to those
privileged with his intimacy. He delighted at times in throwing off his
mantle of prophecy, and unbending even to jollity, in his home life and
among friends. The presence of a stranger was a check to such
exuberance. And it was not from any unsocial habit that he fell into
this restraint. It was because he found that the unguarded words of a
public man are often given a weight they were not intended to bear. If
he unbent as one might whose every word has not come to be thought of
value, it led to misunderstandings. In his home and among near friends
he revealed a charming readiness to engage in lively and frolicsome
conversation.

Some stories illustrating his keen sense of humor, and specimens of
verse written in rollicking vein for special occasions, which might not
properly find place in a serious attempt at biography, I have thought
might be allowed in such an informal work as this. Few of the lines I
shall here give have ever appeared in any of h