I. TWILIGHT AND EVENING BELL 301 Whittier's death at Hampton Falls, N. H. Celebration of his birthdays. Funeral and memorial services. Personal reminiscences. Fac-simile of letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes. APPENDIX. BIBLIOGRAPHY 375 * * * * * PART I. LIFE. CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY. The Hermit of Amesbury, the Wood-thrush of Essex, the Martial Quaker, the Poet of Freedom, the Poet of the Moral Sentiment,--such are some of the titles bestowed upon Whittier by his admirers. Let us call him the Preacher-Poet, for he has written scarcely a poem or an essay that does not breathe a moral sentiment or a religious aspiration. What effect this predetermination of character has had upon his artistic development shall be discussed in another place. The present chapter--which may be called the propylaeum or vestibule of the biographical structure that follows--will deal with the poet's ancestry, and the information afforded by it, and the two chapters that succeed will afford unmistakable evidence of the truth that a poet, no less than a solar system or a loaf of bread, is the logical resultant of a line of antecedent forces and circumstances. The fine but infrangible threads of our destiny are spun and woven out of atom-fibres indelibly stamped with the previous owners' names. Their characters immingle in our own,--the affluence or the indigence of their intellects, the sugar or the nitre of their wit, the shifting sand or the unwedgeable iron of their moral natures. * * * * * The name Whittier is spelled in thirty-two different ways in the old records: a list of these different spellings is given in Daniel Bodwell Whittier's genealogy of the family. The common ancestor of the Whittiers is Thomas Whittier, who in the year 1638 came from Southampton, England, to New England, in the ship "Confidence," of London, John Dobson, master. It is recorded of Thomas Whittier, says his descendant, the poet, in a half facetious way, that the only noteworthy circumstance connected with his coming was that he brought with him a hive of bees. He was born in 1620. His mother was probably a sister of John and Henry Rolfe, with the former of whom he came to America. His name at that time was spelled "Whittle." He married Ruth Green, and lived at first in Salisbury, Mass. He seems afterward to have lived in Newbury. In 1650 he removed to Haverhill, where he was admitted freeman, May 23, 1666.