The following elegiac stanza, written by honest Robert on the occasion of the death of his wife, is irresistibly ludicrous:--
"No more may I the Spring Brook trace, No more with sorrow view the place Where Mary's wash-tub stood; No more may wander there alone, And lean upon the mossy stone, Where once she piled her wood. 'T was there she bleached her linen cloth, By yonder bass-wood tree; From that sweet stream she made her broth, Her pudding and her tea."
Mr. Whittier says that the last time he saw Robert, "Threescore years and ten," to use his own words,
'Hung o'er his back, And bent him like a muckle pack,'
yet he still stood stoutly and sturdily in his thick shoes of cowhide, like one accustomed to tread independently the soil of his own acres,--his broad, honest face seamed by care and darkened by exposure to all the 'airts that blow,' and his white hair flowing in patriarchal glory beneath his felt hat. A genial, jovial, large-hearted old man, simple as a child, and betraying neither in look nor manner that he was accustomed to
'Feed on thoughts which voluntary move Harmonious numbers.'"
The winter of 1828-29 was passed by Whittier in Boston. He once with characteristic modesty told the writer that he drifted into journalism that winter, as editor of the _American Manufacturer_, in the following way: He had gone to Boston to study and read. He undertook the writing for the _Manufacturer_ not because he had much liking for questions of tariff and finance, but because his own finances would thereby be improved. Mr. Whittier's chief personal trait is extreme shyness and distrust of himself, and he deprecated the idea that he had any special power as a writer at the time of which we are speaking, saying that he had to study up his subjects before writing. But undoubtedly he must have wielded a vigorous pen, and been known to possess a cool and careful head, or he would not have been invited to assume the editorship of such a paper. He himself admitted, in the course of the conversation, that at that time he had political ambitions, and made a study of political economy and civil politics.
In 1830 we find Whittier at Haverhill again. In March of that year he was occupying the position of editor of the _Essex Gazette_, and "issued proposals to publish a 'History of Haverhill,' in one volume of two hundred pages, duodecimo, price eighty-seven and one-half cents per copy. 'If the material swelled the volume above two hundred pages, the price was to be one dollar per copy.'" But the limited encouragement offered, and the amount of work required to compile the volume, led the young editor to abandon the project. Whittier was editor of this _Gazette_ for six months,--from January 1 to July 10, 1830. On May 4, 1836, after he had returned from Philadelphia, he resumed the editorship of the journal, retaining the position until December 17 of the same year.