Whittier would never take part in an “Authors Reading,” or in anything that had the least publicity. It was only in the garden room at Amesbury that he would read aloud a poem of his own. Or it may have been under the pines at Intervale towering like the forest primeval, or in some other quiet nook among the hills, with a little group of listeners about him--or perhaps with only one eager listener. Then his voice would rise and fall in notes and cadences which gave a wonderful power to the rendering of his own poems and a new perception of beauty in what had already seemed beautiful, a new awe and sublimity in what had before seemed grand. When in the garden room he read “The Palatine” to an entranced listener, his voice made the scene live before her eyes; and in the inevitable retribution following sin prepared the way for that thought which pierces to the depth of life. Never again can that poem give forth its weirdness, its tragic, and awful pathos as it did in the tones of its author. There was nothing of “elocution.” His reading was word painting; one shivered when he said: “Is there, then, no death for a word once spoken? Was never a deed but left its token Written on tables never broken?” His housekeeper, the Scotswoman before referred to, told how one day she had read Mr. Whittier an account in the paper of a weird light mysteriously seen at sea; and she added, “He wrote a poem about it.” This was “The Palatine.” One day after reading “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim” to the writer, he told her that he had written the poem to please himself in the story of what was dear to him, and that he did not so much care if people did not like it. Indeed, the greatness of his fame never kept him from a certain depreciation of his own work, which declared itself in speech and often in his letters. The world sang his praises; but he held to his own verdicts. “I love the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through,” he writes in the “Proem” of his published poems. He loved best the songs for which he could find no words--like all true poets. Who can say that he may not now be singing these in the music of a new tongue? No less than he loved Milton’s poetry did Whittier love the great poet’s sonorous prose. As has been said before, Whittier’s rendering of his own poems brought forth their swing and rhythm and their innermost meaning with a vividness that no one else could give them. To watch the poet as he thus rendered one of his own poems, to listen to the intonations which deepened the melody of the verse was an experience not to be forgotten. * * * * *