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Chapter 9: Whittier at home
One of
Whittier's biographers,
Mr. William Sloane Kennedy, who has also been in a manner a biographer of
Whitman, rather surprises the reader by an unexpected admission in comparing the two.
He says of
Whittier, “He is democratic, not so powerfully and broadly as
Whitman, but more unaffectedly and sincerely.”
It is a concession of some value, the critic having been one of
Whitman's warmest admirers and most generous advocates, and it seems to me to touch the truth very well.
Certainly no one could see
Whittier in contact with his fellow-citizens of a country village, without being struck by the genuineness and healthiness, so to speak, of the relations between them.
If I may repeat my own words used elsewhere, I should say that there was something most satisfactory in the position of the poet among the village people.
He was their pride and their joy, yet he lived as simply as any one, was careful and abstemious, reticent rather than exuberant in manner, and met them wholly on matter-of-fact ground.
He could sit on a barrel and discuss the affairs of the day with the people who came to the “store,” but he did not read them his verses.
I was once expressing regrets for his ill health, in talking with one of the leading citizens of
Amesbury, and found that my companion could not agree with me;
