Here, in the proper season, the flames of a cheerful fire dance upon the brass andirons of the open hearth, in the centre of a wall lined with books; water-colors by Harry Fenn and Lucy Larcom and Celia Thaxter, together with interesting prints, hang on the other walls, rivaled, it may be, by the window that looks down a sunny little orchard, and by the glass-topped door through which you see the green dome of Powow Hill. What worthies have been entertained in this enticing place! Garrison, and Phillips, and Higginson, and Wasson, and Emerson, and Fields, and Bayard Taylor, and Alice and Phœbe Cary, and Gail Hamilton, and Anna Dickinson, are only a few of the names that one first remembers, to say nothing of countless sweet souls, unknown to any other roll of fame than heaven’s, who have found the atmosphere there kindred to their own. The people of Amesbury, and of the adjoining villages and towns, felt a peculiar ownership of their poet; there is scarcely a legend of all the region round which he has not woven into his song, and the neighborhood feel not only as if Whittier were their poet, but in some way the guardian spirit, the genius of the place. Perhaps in his stern and sweet life he has been so, even as much as in his song. “There is no charge to Mr. Whittier,” once said a shopman of whom he had made a small purchase; and there is no doubt that the example would have been contagious if the independent spirit of the poet would have allowed it. The Indian summer days of the poet’s life were spent not all in the places that knew him of old. The greater part of the winter was passed in Boston; a share of the summer always went to the White Hills, of which he was passionately fond, and the remainder of the time found him in the house of his cousins at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, still in his native county of Essex. This is a mansion, with its porches and porticoes and surrounding lawns and groves, which seems meet for a poet’s home; it stands in spacious and secluded grounds, shadowed by mighty oaks, and with that woodland character which birds and squirrels and rabbits, darting in the checkered sunshine, must always give. It is the home of culture and refinement, too, and as full of beauty within as without. Here many of the later poems were sent forth, and here fledglings had the unwarrantable impertinence to intrude with their callow manuscripts, and here those pests of prominence, the autograph seekers, sent their requests by the thousands. But in the early fall the poet stole quietly back to Amesbury, and there awaited Election Day, a day on which he religiously believed that no man has a right to avoid his duty, and of which he always thought as when he saw Along the street The shadows meet Of Destiny, whose hand conceals The moulds of fate That shape the State, And make or mar the common weal.