JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 363 



From this time on, his life was remarkably uneventful. Shy- 

 in temperament, and generally troubled by that sort of robust 

 poor health which frequently accompanies total abstinence, he 

 lived secluded in the Yankee country for the better part of fifty- 

 two years. He wrote a great deal, but rarely, it is said, above 

 half an hour at a time. In 1849 a collection of his poems was 

 published ; in 1857 came another, this time from his final publish- 

 ers, Ticknor and Fields. He had now become a recognized liter- 

 ary figure. He was concerned in the starting of " The Atlantic 

 Monthly." The temper of the North was beginning to come over 

 to the side of abolition. In the war, dreadful as such an event 

 was to his religious convictions, he saw the hand of God destroy- 

 ing the great evil of slavery. He had always adhered to that 

 branch of the Antislavery party which believed in opposing the 

 national evil by regular political means. He was an ardent mem- 

 ber of the Eepublican party; and the close of the war, which 

 found his principles victorious, found him in public estimation a 

 great man. 



In 1871 he was made a Fellow of the American Academy. 

 It is not remembered that he ever attended a meeting. General 

 society, even in its severer forms, he never found congenial. An 

 occasional visit to intimate friends in Boston, and of a summer 

 to the Isle of Shoals, or later to the hill country about Chocorua, 

 were the chief incidents in his life. But he never stopped writ- 

 ing. His ''Birthday Greeting," sent to Dr. Holmes on the 29th 

 of August, 1892, was written only a few weeks before his death. 

 He died, in his eighty-fifth year, at Hampton Falls, New Hamp- 

 shire, on September 7, 1892. 



During his last years he made a final collection of his writ- 

 ings, with a few brief notes.* It is in seven volumes, four of 

 verse and three of prose. The arrangement is a little confusing. 

 He classified his works under a number of not very definite 

 heads, and under each head printed his material chronologically^ 

 The first volume contains "Narrative and Legendary Poems," 

 from 1830 to 1888; the second, "Poems of Nature," from 1830 

 to 1886, "Poems Subjective and Reminiscent," from 1841 to 1887, 

 and "Religious Poems," from 1830 to 1886; the third, "Anti- 

 slavery Poems," beginning with one to William Lloyd Garrison 

 in 1832, and ending with one to his memory in 1879, and "Songs 



* " The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier," Riverside Press, 1893. 



