WHITTIER AT CLOSE RANGE
BY
FRANCES CAMPBELL SPARHAWK
Author of
“A Chronicle of Conquest,” “Honor Dalton,” The “Dorothy Brooke” Series, &c.
BOSTON
THE RIVERDALE PRESS, BROOKLINE
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925
By Frances Campbell Sparhawk
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The Riverdale Press, Brookline, Boston, Mass.
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
F. C. S.
FOREWORD
Thanks are due to Messrs. J. B. Lippincott and Company, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, and “The Congregationalist” for the permitted use of articles written for them and now revised with the new material for the book.
“You do, indeed, know a great deal about uncle,” wrote Whittier’s niece, Mrs. Pickard, to the writer.
In the middle 1830’s Whittier with his mother, her sister “Aunt Mercy,” and his sister Elizabeth, “our youngest and our dearest” of “Snow Bound” memories, removed from his birthplace in Haverhill to the Amesbury home which grew to be so dear to him.
His townspeople held him in admiration and loving reverence. Some came to his home as honored citizens enter a city made free to them, and learned that his life was poetry no less than his writings.
In 1887 he said in a letter to the writer: “I think often of the old days when thy father was alive and sister Lizzie and we were all together.”
As the daughter of his physician and friend, she has given in “Whittier at Close Range” intimate glimpses of his life and character.
Frances Campbell Sparhawk.
Brookline, Massachusetts.
WHITTIER AT CLOSE RANGE
I
[Illustration]
In the garden room, worthy synonym of a poet’s study where blossom flowers of thought and beauty, a young neighbor of the poet awaited his coming.
His easy chair stood with bookshelves on the right hand, whence he could gather from them as he pleased—although books were scattered everywhere over the house—and at its left was the table between the windows looking into the garden, while opposite it stood the door from the little hall, so that the chair faced all who entered the room. She looked across the room at a painting of a California sunset—Starr King’s gift to the poet. Near the painting was the engraving of an Arctic scene sent to the poet and his sister Elizabeth by Dr. Kane on his return from his Arctic explorations. She remembered how for a long time the picture had failed to appear, and how when a duplicate had been sent and hung, this first picture had at last arrived, and had been given by Miss Whittier to one of her Amesbury friends.
The poet had banished from the garden room a fine oil painting of himself in his youth, a striking portrait, full of individuality, yet bearing a suggestion of Burns. But it was not strange that one poet should recall the other, since there was in some respects a marked resemblance in the moods and ideals of the two; while in character and life they were as far asunder as the poles.
When Whittier’s poem on “Burns,” written “On Receiving a Sprig of Heather in Blossom,” was published, his sister Elizabeth wrote to the doctor’s wife, “This song of Burns was written partly before, but thy gift of heather bells has given it all its beauty. Nobody knows how much I love the old romance of Scotland, and the name of heather or moorland always has a charm.” Later, the poet himself told the giver—a Scotswoman—of his early falling in with the poems of Burns, and how the Scottish poet had opened his eyes to the beauty of the simplicities of life and our rich possession in these, and how, taught by Burns, Whittier had
“Matched with Scotland’s heathery hills
The sweetbrier and the clover.”
All his life Whittier saw and taught
“The unsung beauty hid life’s common things below.”
What compensation to him for the limitations which his life work for the slave and his own delicate health imposed upon him! In proclaiming the slave his brother, Whittier came to perceive his own brotherhood with all men bound in whatever slavery of mind and soul, to see that simplicity and reality were the great forces of life and inspiration in poetry as in all other things. His own early instructions prepared him for Burns’ assertion,
“A man’s a man for a’that.”
And from Burns’ most beautiful song Whittier sings,
“With clearer eyes I saw the worth
Of life among the lowly;
The Bible at his cotter’s hearth
Has made my own more holy.”
These dreams and perceptions made him the poet of New England idyls, as did his spiritual inspiration of her ideals. He looked with anointed eyes upon her woods and fields, her hills and streams and her rocky coast. It was first through Burns and then through his own life that he sang:
“Yet on life’s current, he who drifts
Is one with him who rows or sails;
And he who wanders widest lifts
No more of beauty’s jealous veils
Than he who from his doorway sees
The miracle of flowers and trees,
Feels the warm Orient in the noonday air
And from cloud minaret hears the sunset call to prayer!”
He sings the beauty in brooks and fields, the oneness that pervades all nature, and how to the opened eyes,
“From his lone sweetbrier Persian Hafiz smiles,
And Rome’s cathedral awe is in his woodland aisles.”
This world of beauty in everyday life Whittier has revealed to those who do not travel; he has opened their eyes to perceive how great are their possessions, not in the far-away, nor in the future, but here and now. Other poets may arouse longings for the unattainable; but Whittier has shown us how the manna of life lies at our own doors waiting for us to gather. Burns with inspired lyre sings of the daisy and the mouse, of the Doon and the Ayr, of men and of his “Highland Mary.” Whittier sings of flower and tree and field, of mountain and river, of men and women. But over all his pictures arches the depth of the sky giving them perspective and illumination. When he sings of the sea,
“The ocean looketh up to God
As ’twere a living thing;
The homage of its waves is given
In ceaseless worshipping.”
And of life’s trials,
“... darkness in the pathway of man’s life
Is but the shadow of God’s providence
By the great Sun of Wisdom cast thereon.”
To his ears is attuned the music heard through the silences, how
“The harp at Nature’s advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The songs the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.”
Before his eyes,
“The green earth sends her incense up;”
and to his vision,
“The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;”
to him
“The blue sky is the temple’s arch.”
What poet paints nature with a truer touch than he? To him the universe is one thought of God; to him all Nature is informed, not as by the many gods of Polytheism; but by a reverent Monotheism, by the touch of the All-Father and the response of a sentient world.
“So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.”
What artist ever drew with brush a more perfect picture of midsummer heat than Whittier in his prelude to the poem, “Among the Hills”:
“The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind
Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, Unfelt.”
Then the sharp call of the locust stabbing “the noon-silence;” the driver asleep on his haycart; the sheep huddled against the shade of the stone-wall; and
“Through the open door
A drowsy smell of flowers—grey heliotrope
And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette—
Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends
To the pervading symphony of peace.”
The eyes of the visitor in the garden room fell upon the couch standing under the sunset view, and she recalled how many famous persons had sat upon it—Emerson, “his Puritanic face with more than Eastern wisdom lit;” and Bayard Taylor; for she knew of his long and intimate friendship with the poet and his sister, a friendship terminating only with death—if, indeed, Whittier’s friendships have ever terminated; for he seemed to reflect the eternity of Heaven in a heart that never forgot to love. And Sumner had been there—Sumner who with every gift that men prize had turned aside from them all to fight the battle of the slave—“has he not graced my home with beauty all his own?” sang the poet. And many more than these. “What loved ones enter and depart,” recorded Whittier.
The books at hand; the desk beside the long window looking out upon the veranda were evidences of Whittier’s life work and preparation to meet scholar and statesman upon their own grounds.
Near the desk stood the hospitable-throated Franklin stove. What wit and wisdom glowed in the light of its winter fires! And what wonderful closet was that in the garden room. Here the poet kept his wood—and much else besides! For, from it would he come forth armed with his logs and with the wizard-like power to read the thoughts of his companion! And this skill he proved as he sat before the fire and talked in fun or in earnest, often alternating in mood, but always illuminating the subjects he talked upon.
And in the summer days what a background the blackness of the open stove made for the flower treasures which the poet brought from his walks! Then, suddenly, the visitor wondered why there were no flowers upon the hearth that August day?
But even with the thought, the poet came into the room with his arms filled with flowers.
II
As he showed them to her, she touched a spray of the goldenrod. “The signal of autumn—Dame Nature’s first grey hair,” she said.
“Thee’s about right there,” he answered. “And what does thee call that?” And his deft fingers singled out another flower.
“The pale aster in the brook,” she quoted.
He laughed, and went out of the room to put the flowers into water, but not before she had commented upon the splendid cardinal flowers scattered among the asters, and the brilliant sumach leaves and spikes which made a background in the gorgeous mass of color.
Whittier’s poems are rich in descriptions of flowers, and he sang of them as only one who loved them could do:
“For ages on our river borders,
These tassels in their tawny bloom,
And willowy studs of downy silver,
Have prophesied of Spring to come,”
he says of the beloved pussy-willows which open the floral ball of the year among the wild flowers of New England. For the trailing arbutus, our exquisite mayflower, “tinted like a shell,” he has many a word. And he knows the flowers, all of them, from the bloom of the “summer roses,” to where in the August heat,
“Heavy with sunshine droops the goldenrod,
And the red pennons of the cardinal flowers
Hang motionless upon their upright staves;”
to the late autumn where,
“... on a ground of sombre fir,
And azure-studded juniper,
The silver birch its buds of purple shows,
And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose!”
And again to the very latest blossom,
“Last of their floral sisterhood,
The hazel’s yellow blossoms shine,
The tawny gold of Afric’s mine!”
So, throughout the year bloom and brightness, fragrance and beauty find their records in the songs of the poet. “What airs outblown from ferny dells!” he exclaims in his “Last Walk in Autumn” where he treads as if a painter’s brush were in his hand, bringing to the reader’s eye “winter’s dazzling morns” and “sunset lights” and “moonlit snows,” to atone for the loss of summer bloom and greenness.
Whittier took great pride in the beauty and diversity of the flora of his own Essex County; he used to say that it was the richest and most varied of the region. He wrote more than one poem to celebrate autumn festivals in his own town.
In his walks with his sister in her later years, as he writes of her, “too frail and weak” to go herself in search of the flowers she longed for, he would make her rest upon a rock or grassy bank and alone would search for the treasures of wood and field of which both were so fond.
One day when returning from Boston to Amesbury he met a young friend of his on the train. As the two were talking together, a boy selling water lilies passed through the car. The poet bought a bunch of them and gave to his companion. As they sat looking at the exquisite flowers, he said to her: “Thee’d hardly think that the same Hand that made those made snakes.”
That August day while the flowers glowed in the throat of the Franklin stove, converting blackness into splendor, the poet sat in his arm-chair telling his visitor somewhat of the book into which she had peeped while waiting for him; telling her also of other books, and of people and things.
In the talk and laughter that followed he spoke of Dickens, of whose writings the poet was very fond, declaring that he was never so restless, or so troubled over politics, or so blue about himself, or the weather, that he could not have a good laugh over “Pickwick.”
As the poet sat that day beside his books, with the light from the window falling upon him, he looked, as he was, a man among ten thousand. Tall, erect, as he was even to the last, full of the nervous energy that found ready expression in glance and gesture, his head a remarkable height from ear to crown, domelike, built for brains and spiritual power; his eyes radiant at times with the fire of his soul and having the rare capacity both to absorb and to express everything; his heavy eyebrows delighting in swift accompaniments to the humorous twists of his mouth as he told a droll story, or in pain or in moods of despondency dropped down to conceal the eyes that all too plainly revealed how things were in the soul. His whole look was alert, as that of a man whom the last new thing can never surprise.
After a time the poet searched the table for a book he had left there. His visitor explained that a neighbor had come in and borrowed it. “She said you had so many books, you wouldn’t miss it,” added the speaker.
Down came Whittier’s hand upon his knee in the fashion so well known to his intimates; for his hands might have been called almost another feature, such emphasis did they give to his expression.
“I was in the midst of reading it myself,” he retorted. “I wish she had taken something else to amuse her; she won’t care for it; I could have helped her out better in a book. But she is satisfied.” And his infectious laugh was echoed by his hearer.
For Whittier never forgot how precious books had been to him in his childhood and early youth; and how he had hungered for them. And now that he had them in abundance, he so gladly shared them with his friends that these had the habit of coming in and, if he happened to be away, of helping themselves to whatever they wanted to borrow; so that the poet would often search about for a book that he himself wished to lend and, not finding it, would remark resignedly that he guessed somebody had come in and taken it.
How natural and true was his life—that simple life so much praised at present, and so little lived! How unfettered by ceremony and the impedimenta of pomp was the genius which awoke the country by its ringing songs of freedom, and at the same time with a skill and statesmanship which the best politicians acknowledged and were glad to profit by, helped to build up the great party which destroyed slavery, saved the Union, and in spite of its grievous later faults, may well be proud of its record and its continued accomplishments.
How simple was the home in which so much that was grand and permanent was accomplished! For in the garden room great plans were formulated—yes, and the spirit to execute them inspired—great poems were sung, and there were born great thoughts that have helped to move the world onward and Heavenward. How ready was the many-sided Whittier to welcome all phases of human nature but the evil, and in his abhorrence of evil still to pity the evildoers! His neighbors and friends never forgot that he was a great man, with power that had a long arm and fame that reached across the water—a longer distance then than today.
But how could they help confiding their homely cares and difficulties to one so sympathetic and so wise? And how could they help coming to his home as one honored enters a city the freedom of which has been bestowed upon him?
It was in the garden room that the home life of the poet centered; and here his friends from a distance and the neighbors who were also friends sought him. In his chair by the window, or in winter beside the open fire, he was wont to entertain his guests; and only those who were thus entertained know how rich was the feast of thought and soul spread for even the least worthy of them.
His humor so seldom caught in his writings by reason of the many and deeper powers in him, here glowed in his thoughts and flashed up in his words warming and cheering his atmosphere as the open fire of which he was so fond warmed and brightened the garden room. And, indeed, it seems as if there must have been a subtle sympathy between the two forces. For the poet was never keener or more racy than when, having thrown on fresh wood, he knelt on one knee, adjusted the sticks, watched the flames dart out and catch the new fuel, and then suddenly turned his head with that birdlike motion of his and made some remark to his visitor, often, as has been said, catching the latter’s very thought.
III
As a poet should sing of his home, Whittier sang the beauties of the scenery in and around the town in which he lived, its walks and drives giving views of hilltop and lake, of stream and ocean.
Amesbury is set among the hills, Powow Hill at its back and the swift stream of the same name running from the foot of this hill through the town and going on to join the Merrimac. Amesbury is a border town—the only town of this name in the whole country, this and its neighbor Salisbury being called from the famous Amesbury and its adjacent Salisbury in England. Amesbury with the beautiful Merrimac River on its south, has on its north the rounded summits which make New Hampshire from its very beginning the land of hills. It was one of the earliest settled towns in America, receiving its name in 1667, and electing its board of “Prudenshall” the following year. From earliest times, Whittier’s own family figured largely in the annals of this region, Whittier Hill in Amesbury having been named from one of his ancestors. It was impossible that Whittier should not have deep interest in its history and legends, and in its people among whom he had intimate and dear friends.
With the poet’s keen eye for beauty he saw
“the winding Powow fold
The green hill in its belt of gold.”
He pictures on the banks of the Powow old “Cobbler Keezar” beholding through his magic lapstone the river, then
“Woodsy and wild and lonesome,”
changed to the day when the mighty forest was “broken by many a steepled town.”
A stone’s throw from Whittier’s grave still stands the house of “Goodman Macey,” the hero of the poem, “The Exiles,” which tells his story. The haunted house in the poem, “The New Wife and the Old,” is still pointed out in Hampton, although recently it has been removed to another site, restored and inhabited by other than ghosts. “Margaret Smith’s Journal,” in his prose writings, takes the reader through the woods of Newbury giving many a picturesque incident of the life of the times—and many a touching one. “The Double-Headed Snake” is a legend of Newbury; “The Bridal of Pennacook” sketches the upper portions of the Merrimac; “The Swan Song of Parson Avery” sends its singer from the Newbury shores out beyond the bar and into the great ocean. In his songs the poet carries us along the Salisbury shore of the river to the Chain Bridge which crosses it at Deer Island, the home of Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, his contemporary, herself novelist and poet; thence up the Newbury shore to that poem of streamlets, the Artichoke, which slipping beneath the overhanging boughs of trees that all but meet across it, goes through the old mill race—Curson’s Mill—to join the Merrimac.
Beyond the woods and the two rivers lies the ocean. “The Tent on the Beach” describes the long stretch of Salisbury before its invasion, first by shanties and then by hotels and casinos and cottages, transformed its picturesque solitudes. But nothing can make less magnificent the long roll of the incoming surf along its six miles of almost unbroken reach of sands.
In one of his letters Whittier says:
“The country about here never looked so beautiful as now. We went to Salisbury pine woods yesterday after meeting. I never saw such perfect and glorious effects of light and shadow—such perfection of green earth and blue sky—such grottoes and labyrinths of verdure, barred at the entrance by solid beams of sunlight, like golden gates. At such times I wish I were a painter.”
In this same letter the poet gives a touch of home life. “We had a pleasant visit from Lucy Larcom last week,” he writes. “Brother Frank was here on sixth day on his way from Boston—will be back tomorrow or next day. We have had the famous Moncure Conway here. He came over last week with the Cursons.”
“The Cursons” were two interesting sisters of fine New England ancestry. The sisters with their mother lived at Curson’s Mills where the fairy Artichoke flows to meet the Merrimac. It was to these sisters Whittier’s “Lines after a Summer’s Day’s Excursion” were written:
“Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke
The morning dreams of Artichoke
Along his wooded shore!
Varied as varying Nature’s ways,
Sprites of the river, woodland fays,
Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.”
In “Snow Bound” Whittier speaks to his brother as being the only one of that family group left beside himself. The tie between the brothers was very close. Many times the poet’s letters refer to this brother, enjoying him in health, watching over him when ill, and following him with fadeless love when Franklin passed on before him.
A relative of the Whittiers and at one time in the poet’s family has spoken to the writer of the brightness and wit of Franklin, himself also a writer although under an assumed name, and of the brilliant conversation of the two men as they sat together in the garden room, their reminiscences and familiar talk interrupted by peals of laughter. For the poet who showed chiefly his grave side to the world had in him a rich vein of humor—and his friends and neighbors knew that it never gave out through want of being worked! Franklin’s daughter, her aunt’s namesake, lived with the poet from early girlhood until her marriage.
How Whittier loved all that region! But most of all, he sings of the Merrimac—river worthy of his songs!—of the Merrimac bordering the town of his birth and of his later home, the river of which he says “never was it by its valley-born forgotten.” With what delight he pictures its loveliness from its source among “Winnepesaukee’s hundred isles, through the green repose of Plymouth meadows, the gleam and ripple of Campton rills,” to where it flows, “green-tufted, oak-shaded by Amoskeag’s fall,” and adown its gleaming miles to “Salisbury’s beach of shining sand.”
Whittier’s Indian poems, except “Mogg Megone” and “Pentucket,” breathe that note of sadness for the defeated and sorrowing which he always felt and which his spirit will feel until such defeat and sorrow are wiped out of the world—the very spirit of his writings and of his life.
“Still thy love, O Christ arisen,
Yearns to reach these souls in prison.”
To his faith the message of the Spirit is sent everywhere and its
“... tongues of fire
On dusty tribes and twilight centuries sit.”
Mrs. Spofford in a delightful sketch of the poet tells how in the stirring events of the early days of the seventeenth century, in the midst of the bitter strife between the red man and the white, the Whittiers lived in the calm and safety of their own peaceful Quaker faith. They were as was William Penn to the red man. Indian attacks, Indian massacres, white women and children fleeing to the fort for their lives, white men with the rifles mowing down red savages—as the red savages whenever they could find or make opportunity tomahawked and scalped in hate the white intruders—the Whittier household had no part in these horrors; these were crimes they neither perpetrated nor suffered from. Their door was always on the latch; no gun was ever behind it, or in the hands of its men. The Indians entered and departed at will, always to meet with kindness and never to return this by injury, quick to distinguish between friend and foe, and ready to return kindness with confidence. For that household there were no wild terrors, no midnight massacres.
This fact, while it gives to the character the courage and faith in God and man shown by the Whittier ancestry as Friends, also, it should be remembered, speaks significantly for the appreciation of these traits by the “noble red man.” Many times the Indian has shown that he was capable of response to confidence in him and the appeal to his sense of honor.
At one time the poet was applied to for a fitting name for a house recently built in the region of Kenoza Lake on the outskirts of Haverhill. He answered the friends who forwarded the request:
“I have looked over Roger Williams’ ‘Key to the Indian Language,’ and find nothing that seems quite to answer Mr. S——’s purpose.
‘Yokomish—I lodge here.
Nowekin—I dwell here.
Wotomuck—At Home.
Washowanan—Hawk or Hawk’s Place.
Wussokat—Walnut Trees.’
Most of the names are very long and hard to pronounce. How would the name of the great Sachem, or Chief, on the Merrimac River and whose father owned the whole valley, do for the place? It is a pleasant, well-sounding name and wouldn’t be inappropriate; for the Sachem who bore it doubtless had wandered through the woods and fished in the lakes between which the house stands—Wolanset. He was the son of Passaconaway, the mightiest Indian chief in the Northern section of New England and who always made his home on the banks of the Merrimac. Both were friends of the whites and all the associations of their names are pleasant.”
IV
To Whittier, a Friend, a man of peace, the Civil War with its sufferings, its horrors, its changing fortunes, and for those days its vast sacrifice of life was a continual torture. Yet he realized its significance. From the firing of the first gun at Sumter he perceived that the war was destined to sweep from the land the crime of slavery. His inspired poem, “Laus Deo,” declares what that meant to him.
Being a Quaker, the poet was, of course, never present at war meetings.
But when during the war contributions were sent from Amesbury, as from other towns, to the front, Whittier was always greatly interested. He knew when boxes went to the soldiers, and he was often well posted as to the contents of these boxes.
And upon one occasion, at least, he was memorably on hand—to some regretfully so—when the townspeople were raising subscriptions for the Sanitary Commission and for the soldiers. Patriotism was at a low ebb that day, for the subscriptions lagged persistently, so that when it came time for the meeting to break up, the needed amount had not been raised, and things looked as if it would not be forthcoming.
Then the authority which the poet as a man of affairs never failed to put forth at need came to the front.
Whittier rose.
He wasted no strength in appeal to a patriotism overswept by avarice; but made his demands upon that avarice itself.
“If this sum needed,” he said, naming it, “is not raised by this meeting, I shall write to Salmon Chase [Secretary of the Treasury] to have your exemption money on the next draft of men put up to seven hundred dollars instead of three hundred, as it is now.”
That was all.
But it was enough. His audience looked at the speaker’s tall, erect figure, his flashing eyes, his resolute mouth—and decided not to take the risk. The required amount was immediately forthcoming.
All the world knows how in the poet’s early days he put aside the ambitions of youth and genius—ambitions which the early call of the world to him proved would have been richly fulfilled—and fought the hard battle for the slave, and endured its contumely.
His own words tell the story. In his poem, “Lines Written in the Book of a Friend,” he sings of himself:
“Founts gushed beside my pilgrim way,
Cool shadows on the greensward lay,
Flowers swung upon the bending spray.
“In vain!—nor dream, nor rest, nor pause
Remain for him who round him draws
The battered mail of Freedom’s cause.
“With soul and strength, with heart and hand,
I turned to Freedom’s struggling band,—
To the sad Helots of our land.”
Here was that self-denial, that experience of longings unfulfilled—through the fulfillment of higher longings—which gave him his depth and power of sympathy in every loss and suffering of others, and courage in the sufferings of his own life, and which ripened and sweetened his nature.
Whittier’s prominence in the anti-slavery conflict is, of course, matter of history. His influence in politics was great; for he had the keenness of insight, the broad vision of the statesman, and the politician’s skill in manipulation which never deteriorated into political trickery in a heart that loved his fellowmen and a soul that abhorred self-seeking. One day in a package of books that went from his home to the doctor’s house, there was slipped in by accident a bit of paper on which were the two following lines in the poet’s handwriting, but unsigned:
“That lowest form of worship known
Which incense burns to self alone.”
The identical lines are not found in any of his poems and were probably altered. But their spirit is ever with him. Mrs. Claflin in her interesting sketch of the poet says:
“Mr. Whittier was a keen observer of all public affairs and the trusted adviser of many of the most eminent men of the Old Bay State. He seemed to have prophetic vision and was one of the most sagacious counselors in the State then famous for its able men.”
V
In the January of 1864 Whittier wrote to M—— C——, a dear Amesbury friend, who was spending a few weeks at Norfolk under the protection of the Union army and doing some work for the soldiers there.
“Thy letter from Norfolk,” he says, “has just reached us, and we [his sister Elizabeth and himself] enjoyed its graphic description of your present locality and prospects.... The weather here is cold again.... Elizabeth is much as usual, unable to write much, so I hold the pen for her. We had a pleasant visit from Bayard Taylor last week. Night before last he sent us a picture he painted in 1857 on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. It is a view of the little church of Vadso, the northernmost Russian settlement.... Who knows but that thee may enter Richmond with the victorious army! Stranger things have happened.”
A penciled line from Elizabeth on the same sheet says: