The poet does not mention that he himself was one of the “friends” most active in this endeavor to help a neighbor to tide over one of those hard places plentifully scattered throughout her life. Her home was across the little side street from Mr. Whittier’s. She had always been a friend and many times a nurse to his sister Elizabeth. For in those days when trained nurses were rare in the country, she often went into families to nurse in illness. She had been much in the poet’s home in his anxiety, his sorrow, and his own times of straitened means. Her early opportunities of education had been small, and yet the terms on which she lived with the Whittier family were in themselves an education. Whittier appreciated her love of books, and it is to her advice that the world owes a beautiful poem. One day when she was in the house he came out of the garden room with a volume of “Mrs. Jamieson” in his hand, and reading this neighbor in whose literary judgment he believed, that writer’s account of the origin of the stars and stripes, he remarked that it would be a good subject for a poem. “Indeed, it would; and you are just the one to write it,” retorted his listener with spirit. “Why don’t you do it?” The poet returned to his room. And we have “The Mantle of St. John de Matha.” Years afterward when poverty and illness had become intimates of hers, from her bed of pain which was henceforth to know only respite and not cure, she epitomized in a sentence the poet’s character. Looking up into the face of the writer who standing beside her had been speaking of him, she exclaimed: “Oh--Mr. Whittier!” Her voice choked, her face lighted, her eyes filled with tears. She saw the past with its many trials and sufferings, and to relieve these whenever possible, that blessed presence whose visits to her in her need had not been in one respect as is wrongly said of the angels--“few and far between.” In a moment she added brokenly, “When you need _him_, you never have to say, ‘Come!’ he’s always there!” He was “always there” for any need of any one that he could meet, and he could meet many and diverse needs. For his was his Master’s definition of his neighbor. There was nothing in the range of human experience to which he did not accord open-hearted sympathy--except meanness of motive and falsity of any kind. Yet mixed with hatred of the sin was always compassion for the sinner; for no empty words to him were these: “And hope for all the language is, That He remembereth we are dust.” VIII It was not Whittier’s habit to say in word or manner, “Vex not the poet’s mind With thy shallow wit.”