“The country about here never looked so beautiful as now. We went to Salisbury pine woods yesterday after meeting. I never saw such perfect and glorious effects of light and shadow--such perfection of green earth and blue sky--such grottoes and labyrinths of verdure, barred at the entrance by solid beams of sunlight, like golden gates. At such times I wish I were a painter.” In this same letter the poet gives a touch of home life. “We had a pleasant visit from Lucy Larcom last week,” he writes. “Brother Frank was here on sixth day on his way from Boston--will be back tomorrow or next day. We have had the famous Moncure Conway here. He came over last week with the Cursons.” “The Cursons” were two interesting sisters of fine New England ancestry. The sisters with their mother lived at Curson’s Mills where the fairy Artichoke flows to meet the Merrimac. It was to these sisters Whittier’s “Lines after a Summer’s Day’s Excursion” were written: “Thanks for your graceful oars, which broke The morning dreams of Artichoke Along his wooded shore! Varied as varying Nature’s ways, Sprites of the river, woodland fays, Or mountain nymphs, ye seem.” In “Snow Bound” Whittier speaks to his brother as being the only one of that family group left beside himself. The tie between the brothers was very close. Many times the poet’s letters refer to this brother, enjoying him in health, watching over him when ill, and following him with fadeless love when Franklin passed on before him. A relative of the Whittiers and at one time in the poet’s family has spoken to the writer of the brightness and wit of Franklin, himself also a writer although under an assumed name, and of the brilliant conversation of the two men as they sat together in the garden room, their reminiscences and familiar talk interrupted by peals of laughter. For the poet who showed chiefly his grave side to the world had in him a rich vein of humor--and his friends and neighbors knew that it never gave out through want of being worked! Franklin’s daughter, her aunt’s namesake, lived with the poet from early girlhood until her marriage. * * * * * How Whittier loved all that region! But most of all, he sings of the Merrimac--river worthy of his songs!--of the Merrimac bordering the town of his birth and of his later home, the river of which he says “never was it by its valley-born forgotten.” With what delight he pictures its loveliness from its source among “Winnepesaukee’s hundred isles, through the green repose of Plymouth meadows, the gleam and ripple of Campton rills,” to where it flows, “green-tufted, oak-shaded by Amoskeag’s fall,” and adown its gleaming miles to “Salisbury’s beach of shining sand.”