dly recognition of his work
that came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal
friends were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of
American politics with the keen zest of a veteran in that game, for in
his time he had made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest
politician I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met
many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs,
but retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his
publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his
seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family
that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"--a petty
anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man
waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to
renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come
true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse,
but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had
more kinship with the saints.

A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem
in celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the
Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little
Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary
verses at Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office
for Lowell. He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his
eighty-sixth year--"The Last Leaf," in truth, of New England's richest
springtime.

"No, my friends," he had said in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,"
"I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits
family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five
generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of
family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet,
the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the
Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His
father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the
First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage
that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809.

"Know old Cambridge? Hope you do--
Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
Nicest place that was ever seen--
Colleges red and Common green."