He endeavored to escape from
this dinner, and Messrs. Osgood and Company were obliged to send for him
three times, and most urgently, before he could be persuaded to come. It
is doubtful however if he objected to people's drinking wine in their
own homes. [Footnote: To a friend, who sent him on his seventy-fifth
birth-day a bottle of rare old Andalusian "Olovosa" with a bouquet of
flowers, he wrote:--
"I hasten to thank thee, dear Mrs. ----, for thy kind note, and
accompanying flowers, wreathing like Hafiz on Omar Khayyam's roses, the
wine--not of Shiraz, but of storied Andalusia.
"I am not accustomed to tarry long at the wine--in this case I shall
remember Paul's advice to Timothy.
"I am gratefully thy old friend,
"JOHN G. WHITTIER.
"Boston, Dec. 17, 1892."]
He is the only American poet who may be fairly said to have earned his
living by his poems, though Longfellow might have done so, if it had
been his fortune to reside in a country town. Whittier may have assisted
sometimes in editing the local newspaper, and he once published a volume
of rather tame prose-studies of the Shakers and other strange people who
are found in the southern counties of New Hampshire. I never met with
but one copy of it, and it could not have had a large circulation. He
was not so much an observer of life and manners, as an imaginative
thinker,--one whose reflections took the shape of ideal pictures.
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