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Chapter 13: closing years
There was no literary man of his time who worked under such a lifelong embargo in respect to health as
Whittier.
He once said, “I inherited from my parents a nervous headache, and on account of it have never been able to do all I wished to do.”
Whittier's early trouble was regarded by physicians as a disease of the heart, and he was told that he must carefully avoid excitement.
With care, as one of them assured him, he might live to be fifty years old. His headaches always pursued him, and he could not read continuously for half an hour without severe pain.
At public dinners and receptions he was obliged to stipulate that he should be allowed to slip out when he felt fatigue coming on. It showed great strength of will surely for one man, combining the functions of author, politician, and general reformer, under such disadvantages, to outlive his fellow chiefs, carry so many points for which he had toiled, and leave behind him seven volumes of his collected works.
The most successful of these, “Snow-bound,” was written to beguile the weariness of a sick-chamber.
When editor of the
National Era he wrote to
Miss Wendell that he should have spent the winter in
Washington but for the state of his health and the difficulty of leaving home on his mother's account.
In the same letter (2d.
mo. 21, 1847) he wrote:--
