The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields’s room at the publishing office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief.  He introduced me to the poet:  a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes.  It was just after his poem, ‘Snow Bound’, had made its great success, in the modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment.  I contrived to say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he would have met something more explicit and abundant.  If he had judged fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries.  In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke.  I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be who rarely met.  Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor’s ‘Story of Kennett’, which had then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable aspects.  No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated.  He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who were Foes to good manners.

Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I could count upon him for cordial recognition.  In the quiet of his country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so fully appreciated the importance of the social movement.  Like some others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave.  This is not strange; so few men last over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not that one should not.  Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine.  It was hard to associate with the man