. Whittier-land; a handbook of North Essex. hittiers at the Acad-emy. I think there is now no impropriety in stating thatit is to her that the poem Memories refers.^ She wasliving at the time when the biography of Whittier waswritten, and for that reason her name was not given, butonly a veiled reference in Life and Letters, as at page276. During many years of her widowhood she spent thesummer months in New England, and occasionally metMr. Whittier at the mountains. They were in friendlycorrespondence to the close of his life. She survived him 1 It is of curious interest that although the poem
. Whittier-land; a handbook of North Essex. hittiers at the Acad-emy. I think there is now no impropriety in stating thatit is to her that the poem Memories refers.^ She wasliving at the time when the biography of Whittier waswritten, and for that reason her name was not given, butonly a veiled reference in Life and Letters, as at page276. During many years of her widowhood she spent thesummer months in New England, and occasionally metMr. Whittier at the mountains. They were in friendlycorrespondence to the close of his life. She survived him 1 It is of curious interest that although the poem Memorieswas first puWished in 1841, the description of the beautiful andhappy girl in its opening lines is identical with that of one ofthe characters in AIoll Pitcher, published nine years earlier, and Ihave authority for saying that Mary Smith was in mind when thatportrait was drawn. Probably the reason why Whittier never al-lowed Moll Pitcher to be collected was because he used lines fromit in poems written at later dates. AMESBURY (^1. MARY EMERSOM (SiMITH) THOMAS several years. It has been suggested with some show ofprobabiHty that it is a memory of the days they spent to-gether at her grandfathers that is embodied in the poem* My Playmate. At the time when this poem was writ-ten she was living in Kentucky. She lives where all the golden yearHer summer roses blow ;The dusky children of the sunBefore her come and go. But this poem, like others of Whittiers, is probably acomposite of memories and largely imaginative, as isshown in what is elsewhere said about the localities ofRamoth Hill and Folly Mill. In the garden room also is a miniature on ivory of 68 WHITTIER-LAND a beautiful girl of seventeen, crowned with roses. This isEvelina Bray of Marblehead, a classmate of Whittiers atthe Academy in the year 1827, when this portrait waspainted. But for adverse circumstances, the school ac-quaintance which led to a warm attachment between themmight have resulted in marriage. But
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