Mary Smith, Miss Bray's roommate at Haverhill, and her lifelong friend--though for fifty years they were lost to each other--was afterward the wife of Reverend Doctor S. F. Smith, the author of "America."
Evelina is described as a tall and strikingly beautiful brunette, with remarkable richness of colouring, and she took high rank in scholarship. The house on Water Street at which she boarded was directly opposite that of Abijah W. Thayer, editor of the _Haverhill Gazette_, with whom Whittier boarded while at the academy. Whittier was then nineteen years old, and Evelina was seventeen. Naturally, they walked to and from the school together, and their interest in each other was noticeable.
If the Quaker lad harboured thoughts of marriage, and even gave expression to them, it would not be strange. But the traditions of Whittier's sect included disapproval of music, and Evelina's father had given her a piano, and she was fascinated with the study of the art proscribed by the Quakers. Then, too, Whittier was poor, and his gift of versification, which had already given him quite a reputation, was not considered in those days of much consequence as a means of livelihood. If they did not at first realise, both of them, the hopelessness of their love, they found it out after Miss Bray's return to her home.
About this time Mr. Whittier accompanied his mother to a quarterly meeting of the Society of Friends at Salem, and one morning before breakfast took a walk of a few miles to the quaint old town of Marblehead, where he paid a visit to the home of his schoolmate. She could not invite him in, but instead suggested a stroll along the picturesque, rocky shore of the bay.
This was in the spring or early summer of 1828, and the poet was twenty years old, a farmer's boy, with high ambitions, but with no outlook as yet toward any profession. It may be imagined that the young couple, after a discussion of the situation, saw the hopelessness of securing the needed consent of their parents, and returned from their morning's walk with saddened hearts. Whatever dreams they may have cherished were from that hour abandoned, and they parted with this understanding.
In the next fifty years they met but once again, four or five years after the morning walk, and this once was at Marblehead, along the shore. Miss Bray had in the meantime been teaching in a seminary in Mississippi, and Whittier had been editing papers in Boston and Hartford, and had published his first book, a copy of which he had sent her. There was no renewal at this time of their lover-like relations, and they parted in friendship.