An admiring Quaker in Philadelphia
wrote some verses in honor of Whittier, which were presented to Mrs.
Thaxter for her approval. When she was asked how she liked them, she
replied, "I do not like it all; it goes humpety, lumpety, dumpety,
bump;" and immediately changed the subject of conversation.
On another occasion she took up a volume of poetry which had been
printed for private circulation, and said, "There are two really fine
poems in this, which is more than can be usually said of such
collections." Then she read them to us with such expressive grace as
might almost make poetry out of Latin grammar. One was called the "Whip
of the Sky," and the other was a sonnet about Pompeii.
She early discovered in herself the mesmeric power of a spiritist; and
Wasson was present at a _seance_ which she gave at the house of a
friend in Newburyport, reporting messages from another world to various
persons in the room. She thus naturally became a believer in spiritism,
and finally a Theosophist; but she found that such supernatural
performances were physically injurious and mentally demoralizing, so
that in later years she rarely indulged in them.
One cold, foggy evening in August, 1868, we were gathered in the parlor
of the Thaxter cottage, when some one proposed that we should make an
experiment with planchette. So the little triangular board was produced,
with a long pencil in the apex, and a large sheet of brown paper.
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