Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/27

Rh indeed, an elector on the Republican side in the great Presidential canvass which resulted in the first election of Cleveland. He was much sought for occasional poems, and he complied with these requests from time to time, as in his "Centennial Hymn," "In the Old South," "The Bartholdi Statue," "One of the Signers," and "Haverhill; he was quite as likely to take hint from an occasion without the asking. Yet all this time he was assailed by infirmities which would have shaken the serenity of most. He suffered intensely from neuralgic disorders, and was sadly broken in the last years of his life.

He sang up to the end, one may say. A few weeks before his death, he wrote the verses to Oliver Wendell Holmes which stand at the completion of this collection in the division "At Sundown." True to the controlling spirit of his life, he sings,—

He died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, September 7, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.

H. E. S.