Personal Sketches and Tributes: Part 2 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
Personal Sketches and Tributes: Part 2 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Biography
And now, at the ripe age of eighty-five years, the brave old man has
passed onward to the higher life, having outlived here all hatred, abuse,
and misrepresentation, having seen the great work of Emancipation
completed, and white men and black men equal before the law. I saw him
for the last time three years ago, when he was preparing his valuable
biography of his beloved brother Arthur. Age had begun to tell upon his
constitution, but his intellectual force was not abated. The old,
pleasant laugh and playful humor remained. He looked forward to the
close of life hopefully, even cheerfully, as he called to mind the dear
friends who had passed on before him, to await his coming.
Of the sixty-three signers of the Anti-Slavery Declaration at the
Philadelphia Convention in 1833, probably not more than eight or ten are
now living.
"As clouds that rake the mountain summits,
As waves that know no guiding hand,
So swift has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land."
Yet it is a noteworthy fact that the oldest member of that convention,
David Thurston, D. D., of Maine, lived to see the slaves emancipated, and
to mingle his voice of thanksgiving with the bells that rang in the day
of universal freedom.
BAYARD TAYLOR
Read at the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 10, 1879.
I am not able to attend the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple on the
10th instant, but my heart responds to any testimonial appreciative of
the intellectual achievements and the noble and manly life of Bayard
Taylor. More than thirty years have intervened between my first meeting
him in the fresh bloom of his youth and hope and honorable ambition, and
my last parting with him under the elms of Boston Common, after our visit
to Richard H. Dana, on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of that
honored father of American poetry, still living to lament the death of
his younger disciple and friend. How much he has accomplished in these
years! The most industrious of men, slowly, patiently, under many
disadvantages, he built up his splendid reputation. Traveller, editor,
novelist, translator, diplomatist, and through all and above all poet,
what he was he owed wholly to himself. His native honesty was satisfied
with no half tasks. He finished as he went, and always said and did his
best.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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