GEORGE SELWYN. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER AT AMESBURY Nearly all the likenesses of Mr. Whittier with which the present public is familiar, represent an aged man, albeit with a fire flashing in the eye and illuminating the countenance, like that fire which underlies the snows of Hecla. But if, after having passed eighty, his face was still so strong and radiant, in his youth it must have had a singular beauty, and he kept until the last that eye of the Black Bachelder, a glint of which was to be seen in the eye of Daniel Webster, and possibly, tradition says, in that of Hawthorne and of Cushing. At any rate, he showed a fair inheritance of the strength of will and purpose of that strange hero of song and romance, his Bachelder ancestor. But other strains, as interesting as the old preacher’s, are to be found in Whittier’s ancestry. One of his grandmothers was a Greenleaf, whence his second name, and she is said to have been descended from a Huguenot family of the name of Feuillevert, who translated their name on reaching our shores (as the custom still is with many of our French and Canadian settlers,) to Greenleaf. The poet himself says: The name the Gallic exile bore, St. Malo, from thy ancient mart, Became upon our western shore Greenleaf, for Feuillevert. To the artistic imagination, that likes in everything a reason for its being, there is something satisfactory in the thought of Huguenot blood in Whittier’s veins; and one sees something more than coincidence in the fact that on the Greenleaf coat-of-arms is both a warrior’s helmet and a dove bearing an olive-leaf in its mouth. Among the Greenleafs was one of Cromwell’s Lieutenants; and thus on two sides we find our martial poet born of people who suffered for conscience’ sake, as he himself did for full forty years of his manhood. The scion of such a race--how could he pursue any other path than that which opened before him to smite Armageddon; and yet the grandson of Thomas Whittier, of Haverhill, who refused the protection of the blockhouse, and, faithful to his tenets, had the red man to friend, in the days when the war-whoop heralded massacre to right and left--the grandson of this old Quaker, we say, must have felt some strange stirrings of spirit against spirit, within him, as the man of peace contended with the man of war, and the man of war blew out strains before which the towers of slavery’s dark fortress fell. For Whittier was not only the trumpeter of the Abolitionists, in those dark but splendid days of fighting positive and tangible wrong: he was the very trumpet itself, and he must have felt sometimes that the breath of the Lord blew through him.