A writer in the _Democratic Review_ for August, 1845, speaks of "the fine intellectual beauty of his expression, the blending brightness and softness of the clear dark eye, the union of manly firmness and courage with womanly sweetness and tenderness alike in countenance and character." * * * * * Mr. David A. Wasson says that Whittier is of the Saracenic or Hebrew prophet type: "The high cranium, so lofty, especially in the dome,--the slight and symmetrical backward slope of the _whole_ head,--the powerful level brows, and beneath these the dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire,--the Arabian complexion,--the sharp-cut, intense lines of the face,--the light, tall, erect stature,--the quick, axial poise of the movement,"--all these traits reveal the fiery Semitic prophet. * * * * * The long backward and upward slope of the head, alluded to by Mr. Wasson, is very striking. It is the head of Walter Scott or of Emerson. Whittier is now an old man, somewhat hard of hearing, and with the fixed sadness of time upon his pleasant face. But ever and anon, as you converse with him, his countenance is irradiated by a sudden smile, sweet and strange and full of benignity,--like a waft of perfume from a bed of white violets, or a glint of rich sunlight on an April day. His is one of those Emersonian natures that everybody loves at first sight. The very mole under the right eye seems somehow the birth-mark or sign-manual of kindliness. The quaint grammatical solecisms of the Quaker and the New England farmer--the "thee's" and the omission of the _g_'s from present participles and other words ending in "ing"--give to the poet's conversation a certain slight piquancy and picturesqueness.[17] About half-past nine every morning, when at Amesbury, Mr. Whittier walks down for the mail and the news, and perhaps has a chat with some neighbor on the street, or with the country editor who is setting up in type his own editorials while he grimly rolls his quid of tobacco in his cheek. In the spring and early summer the poet's dress will be after this fashion: black coat and vest, gray pantaloons, cinnamon-colored overcoat, drab tile hat, and perhaps a small gray tippet around his neck. As he walks, he salutes those whom he meets with a little jerky bow. A forty years' residence in Amesbury has made him acquainted with almost everybody, and he might, therefore, very properly be somewhat economical of exertion in his salutations. But his abrupt bow is really the expression of that unbending rectitude and noble pride in individual freedom that made him the reformer and the poet of liberty. As a single instance of Whittier's kind-heartedness, take the following incident, narrated by an anonymous writer in the _Literary World_ for December, 1877: "When I was a young man trying to get an education, I went about the country peddling sewing-silk to help myself