Thaxter's cottage is historic ground.
"There have been fine people here," she said one day in September, about
ten years ago, as the house was closing for the season, "but the summer
is gone, and they have gone with it." Nowhere else since Margaret
Fuller's time have so many wits, geniuses and brilliant women been
gathered together. Whittier and Hawthorne are enough to have consecrated
it, but there have been many others. Hunt, the painter, came there, and
Professor Paine, the composer, as well as other fine artists and
musicians. Even Ole Bull, that Norwegian waif and celebrated violinist,
wandered in there of a forenoon, and entertained the company with
accounts of sea-serpents standing on their tails in front of
water-falls, and other marvels only visible in Norway:--supposing, I
presume, that his hearers would believe anything that he told them.
Mrs. Thaxter's poetry, like all genuine poetry, is indigenous,--native
to the soil. She has taken her subjects from the life and incidents
about her: the little sand-piper, the burgomaster gull, the pimpernel,
and the wreck on White Island--where a vessel was once wrecked in a
dense fog right under the light-house. [Footnote: In the winter of 1876,
centennial year, a schooner laden with salt somehow ran on to the
southerly reef of White Island and lost its rudder. The vessel
consequently became unmanageable, and was finally thrown up on
Londoner's, where the island is so low that at high tide the sea nearly
divides it in two.
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