The surprising profits of “Snow-Bound” made Whittier—to whom, as he himself said, the doors of magazines and publishing houses had been shut for twenty years of his life—a well-to-do man henceforward. He never married. But he prided himself upon never losing a friend, and many homes were graciously offered to him in his old age. After the marriage of his niece in 1876, he became for a large part of each year the guest of his cousins at Oak Knoll, Danvers. In this stately and beautiful home, and in many friendly houses in Boston, he met frequently some of the best men and women of his time. His relations with the chief American authors of his day were cordial, although scarcely intimate. Most of them gathered in honor of his seventieth birthday at a dinner given by the publishers of “The Atlantic,” and the subsequent anniversaries of his birth were very generally noticed. But his life was essentially a solitary one. Professor Carpenter has noted in his admirable study of Whittier that his most familiar acquaintances and correspondents, in his later life, were women. “In old age his was the point of view, the theory of life, of the woman of gentle tastes, literary interests, and religious feeling. The best accounts of his later life are those of Mrs. Claflin and Mrs. Fields, in whose houses he was often a guest; and they have much to say of his sincere friendliness and quiet talk, his shy avoidance of notoriety or even of a large group of people, his keen sense of humor, his tales of his youth, his quaintly serious comments on life, his sudden comings and goings as inclination moved, and of the rare occasions when, deeply moved, he spoke of the great issues of religion with beautiful earnestness and simple faith. And it is pleasant to think of this farmer’s lad, who had lived for forty years in all but poverty for the love of God and his fellows, taking an innocent delight in the luxury of great houses and in the sheltered life of those protected from hardship and privation. After his long warfare this was a just reward.”[2] After the publication of “Snow-Bound” in 1866, Whittier composed nearly two hundred poems. They celebrate some of his friendships, and indicate the variety of his reading and his interest in progress both in this country and in Europe. They describe, with loving accuracy, the mountains, streams, and shore of New Hampshire, where he usually made his summer pilgrimages. But few of these later poems, pleasant reading as they are, affect materially one’s estimate of Whittier’s poetic powers. His real work was done. Here and there, and notably in the idyl “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim,” there is a grace and ripeness which indicate the Indian Summer of his art, with lovely lines written for the “wise angels” rather than for discordant men. One thinks with a sigh of his description of himself in “The Tent on the Beach”:—