inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged
fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have
been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In
him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty
Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger,
though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I
myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though
afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be
who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second
meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had then lately
appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in
its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker
descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of),
and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into
which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He
thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep
it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own
some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who
were Foes to good manners.

Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some
others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out