“Pouring out cups of invisible tea,” and says, “Yonder a poet sits chained at thy feet.” This was literally true, for the writer coming that day into the garden room, found him seated on the floor with the baby daughter of a relative, entertaining his young visitor and being entertained while Miss Larcom looked on smiling. * * * * * To one of these young friends to whom he used to talk of many things in Heaven and on earth, he once said: “Thy conscience stands in thy way.” “I don’t see what I can do,” she retorted. “I can’t get rid of it. I suppose I shall have to let it stand.” To this he readily assented. His remark may have been a test. * * * * * To waken a dormant power, to teach an unfledged thought to take wing and fly boldly, to turn stray impulses into steady purpose for good, to stimulate youthful promise to become the worthy performance of maturity, to break the chains of ignorance and prejudice, as he had helped to break the iron chains of the slave, was not only delight to Whittier, it was one of the objects for which he lived. The men and women who knew him in their youth and who are still living have rich memories of words fitly spoken by which he opened their eyes to opportunities hitherto unseen, turned their thoughts into new channels and stimulated them to nobler performance. “I like thy courage and perseverance,” he wrote to a young friend entering the path of literature, “and what thee say of sometime writing out thy heart as if nobody were to read and comment upon it. I suspect that is the true way; and there are passages in thy letter which are better than thee dare to print.” * * * * * One of his young friends in whose latent literary powers he had faith and whom stress of circumstances had brought into financial difficulties, one day came to see him. Another visitor interrupted their conversation and Mr. Whittier did not get the opportunity to say to her what he would have liked to say. The poet, however, was a man of resources. The way of speech being blocked, he took the path of suggestion. He made her a gift of some new pens--“_to try_.” * * * * * But the poet who gathered this circle of young people about him, holding them by the charm of his personality, who said that the way to keep young was to be with the young, who delighted in youth even to the last, giving evidence in himself that age is but the youth of immortality, was yet to youth, as he was to maturity, a leader--his judgment, not theirs, dominated. This was the case one autumn day as he sat in the garden room smilingly listening to the pleadings of a bright and interesting member of that large family of his “boys and girls.”