We have had, and
shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, but we have
never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had more
kinship with the saints.
A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem
in celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of
the Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892.
The little Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed
some tender obituary verses at Whittier's passing. He had already
performed the same office for Lowell. He lingered himself until
the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year--"The Last Leaf," in
truth, of New England's richest springtime.
"No, my friends," he had said in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table," "I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who
inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
least four or five generations." The Doctor came naturally by his
preference for a "man of family," being one himself. He was a
descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the poetess. "Dorothy Q.
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