Whitsuntide

“ To the Editor of the Every-Day Book.
Sir,—The approaching Whitsuntide brings to my remembrance a custom which I believe to be now quite obsolete.
I remember when I was a boy that it was usual in Devonshire, at Easter and Whitsuntide, for young people of both sexes to form a ring at fairs and revels, and play at what was termed “drop handkerchief.” After the ring was formed, which used to be done with little difficulty, a young man would go round it once or twice, examining all the time with curious eye each well formed blooming maiden ”

“ About Whitsuntide her sleep began to fail; then fever set in.
“Oh, how expensive quinine is!” sighed Paul, when the servant rode off to the chemist’s; and he looked appealingly at “Black Susy,” but she did not move. Often the work in the fields had to come to a stand-still, in order that they might earn a few groschen for the household by cutting peat. ”

“ The Feast of Pentecost, or Whitsuntide, was formerly kept as a high church festival, and by the people was celebrated by out-door sports and festivities, and especially by the drinking assemblies called "Whitsun-Ales." One writer (inquiring whether the custom of "lifting at Easter" is a memorial of Christ being raised up from the grave) observes that, "there seems to be a trace of the descent of the Holy Ghost on the heads of the Apostles, in what passes at Whitsuntide Fair, in some parts of Lancashire ”

“ At Whitsuntide, under medical advice, he went to Homburg, where he died of gout on 29 July 1877, and was buried privately in the English cemetery there on the following morning. As chancellor of the exchequer he showed financial aptitude, but his administration of the admiralty was signalised by a melancholy series of disasters. ”

“ Evans has turned the key to unlock the causes, and it should be a lesson to every pioneer and citizen of the country. Since copying the noble encomium on Dr. Whitman and family by the Hon. Elwood Evans, I have received the Weekly Oregonian of December 26, and find the honorable gentleman has been converted to the principles of our Oregon historical rat's nest discoverer, which brings to our mind the following remark of a good old deacon in an Eastern church in reference to a slanderous statement about a member of the church—"Let the devil alone, it will kill itself." ”

“ Eells has as fair a reputation for truthfulness as some other common mortals, he very kindly has simply charged the fault to Dr. Eells' memory thirty-six years after the memorable journey. I do not deny that the memory of aged people is sometimes treacherous as well as that of some of us who are younger; but whether it failed Dr. E. at this time must be decided after reading the following: In 1882 I published a pamphlet about Dr. Whitman, his journey East in 1842, and what he did to save Oregon and promote the immigration of 1843. I sent a copy of this to Gov. Evans. ”

“ In this work of the Missionaries Jason Lee, the chief of the Methodist Missions, was, up to the date of the incident we are to narrate, the most successful of all. He was a man of great strength of character. Like Whitman, he was also a man of great physical strength, fearless, and, with it all, wise and brainy. No other man among the pioneers, for his untiring energy in courting immigration, can be so nearly classed with Whitman.
They were all men, who, though in Oregon to convert Indian savages to Christianity, yet were intensely American. ”

“ Every other advocate of the Whitman Legend who has quoted from this letter has refrained, as carefully as Dr. Mowry has, from making a fair quotation from it, so that this is the first chance the public has ever had to read exactly what Whitman wrote three and one-half years after his return to Oregon, and all that has been found that he ever wrote, making any claim that anything other than the business of saving the mission from destruction impelled him to make his ride. ”

“ In the middle ages the Whitsun services were marked by many curious customs. Among these described by Durandus (Rationale div. off. vi. 107) are the letting down of a dove from the roof into the church, the dropping of balls of fire, rose-leaves and the like. Whitsun is one of the Scottish quarter-days, and though the Church festival is movable, the legal date was fixed for the 15th of May by an act of 1693. ”

“ Whitman seems one of those old bards, fresh from the hand of nature, young with the first creation, the newest handwork of the great Master, untaught in any schools, unfettered by any of the myriad chords, which time is ever weaving about the brains and 44hearts and consciences of men as the world grows gray; a primitive bard of nature, born by some chance or accident in this old, tired, worn-out world, dropped into this Nineteenth century with its machines and conventions, its artificial life, its unnatural morals and its fettered limbs. ”

“ Effeminate therefore I suppose the modern poetry of England must be content to remain; but there is a poet alive of now acknowledged eminence, not hitherto assailed on this hand, about whom the masked or barefaced critics of the minute are not by any means of one mind—if mind we are to call the organ which forms and produces their opinions. To me it seems that the truth for good and evil has never yet been spoken about Walt Whitman. There are in him two distinct men of most inharmonious kinds; a poet and a formalist. ”

“ Bucke and Mr. Edward Carpenter came to Camden on pilgrimage.
Whitman often said in his later years that his best friends had been women, and that of his women friends Mrs. Gilchrist was the nearest. She was an Essex girl of good family, nine years younger than Whitman. [573] At school she had loved Emerson, Rousseau, Comte and Ruskin, and a little later she added to them the writings of Carlyle, Guyot and Herbert Spencer. Music and science, with the philosophical suggestions which spring from the discoveries of science, were her chief interests. ”

“ His “Leaves of Grass” is a sort of dictionary of the English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.
But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. ”

“ This would require another journey of three hundred miles, but as it could be made in boats, and the Indians were capital oarsmen, they resolved to take their wives with them, and thus complete the wedding journey.
The gallant Dr. McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Company, was a keen judge of human nature, and read men and women as scholars read books, and he was captivated with the 86 open, manly ways of Dr. Whitman and the womanly accomplishments of the fair young wife, who had braved the perils of an overland journey with wholly unselfish purposes. Whitman soon developed to Dr. ”

“ In the midst of wheat harvest there came a week of extremely sultry weather which affected him very sensibly, and as Mrs. Whitman was passing through the room where the old gentleman sat asleep in his chair, she was alarmed by the extreme paleness of his features, went to the chair and found him unconscious. She summoned her husband and children, who were near by reaping, but when they reached the house he was no more. A well-spent life had ceased without a struggle. ”

“ Some may say, "this is only a supposable case," and it would be true, but the facts are that England, through her Hudson Bay Company, had virtually owned and controlled Oregon for nearly half a century, from 1818 up to the day Whitman started upon his great ride, altogether with the official sanction of the American people. There can scarcely be a doubt in regard to it, for reasons before stated, that England expected to continue to hold it all, or at least a large portion of it. Those who shout no danger are blind to historic facts. ”

“ These among others are reasons why I think it foolish to talk of Whitman as the probable founder of a future school of poetry unlike any other in matter as in style. He has many of the qualities of a reformer; he has perhaps none of the qualities of a founder. For one thing, he is far too didactic to be typical; the prophet in him too frequently subsides into the lecturer. He is not one of the everlasting models; but as an original and individual poet, it is at his best hardly possible to overrate him; as an informing and reforming element, it is absolutely impossible. ”

“ To Walt Whitman there could be no thought of class or caste. Each one held his certificate of birth from the same infinite power that, through all the ages and all the false and criminal distinctions of man, has yet decreed that all shall enter helpless and naked through the same gateway of birth, and each alike must go back to the fundamental mother, shorn of every distinction that man in his vain-glorious pride has sought to make. Whitman placed the works of nature above the works of man. ”

“ Braver men the world has not known. Beside him, differing in creed, but united with him in works of love and charity, sat Thomas Whitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm in Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight. ”

“ Whitman, till a young priest, perhaps not so discreet as the older, and not thinking that there was an American at the table, sprang to his feet, and swinging his hand, exclaimed: 'Hurrah for Columbia! (Oregon.) America is too late; we have got the country. In an instant, as by instinct, Dr. Whitman saw through the whole plan, clear to Washington, Fort Hall, and all. He immediately rose from the table and asked to be excused, sprang upon his horse, and in a very short time stood with his noble 'Cayuse,' white with foam, before his door ”

“ In the clear light of that regenerated time, when the world looks back to the doubt and mist and confusion of to-day, Walt Whitman will stand alone, the greatest, truest, noblest prophet of the age, a man untainted by artificial life and unmoved by the false standards of his time. In a sodden, commercial, money-getting age, he enjoyed all the beauty of the earth without the vulgar lust to own. In a world of privilege and caste, he felt and taught the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all living things. ”

“ There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's: that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large sense, the general drift of Whitman's writings, even down to the passages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man, as the unit—the datum—from which all that we know, discern, and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and sensual, has to be computed. ”

“ The internal evidence that Webster never wrote this is irresistible, for, whatever were Webster's failings, he always uttered sensible and dignified English in discussing important public affairs, and the final sentence of this extract as quoted by Gunsaulus in his Introduction to Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," is, "Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it is now." ”

“ Whitman, Mr. Spalding, and Chief Trader McKinley walked into the dimly lighted council lodge. For a moment there was tumult, but the three white men stood firm and fearless.
"What has the Great Medicine to say?" inquired Yellow Serpent, looking at Dr. Whitman. The doctor stepped forward and the Indians all craned their necks to listen.
"Chief, you have lost your noble son. We all mourn with you. I hear you want me to go away. When I came among you, you had no farms, no gardens. I have taught you to read and to work, and to live like white folks. Now I can go. I am getting old. ”

“ A man may have excellent points in his make-up, as Dr. Spalding had, and yet not be a good pioneer.
He and his noble wife made a grand success, however, when they got into the field of work. It was Mrs. Spalding who first translated Bible truths and Christian songs into the Indian dialect.
It seemed a discouraging start for the little company when compelled to pull out upon the boundless plains alone. But led by Whitman, they persevered and caught the convoy late in May.
The doctor's boys now proved of good service. They were patient and untiring and at home on the trail. ”

“ Men may be as positive in error as in truth.”
The most prolonged and bitterly contested controversy that has divided the ranks of pioneers and pioneer historians is what is known as the Whitman legend. Possibly not ten per cent of the people of the state have anything but a passing interest in this controversy or special knowledge of the merits of the question.
question. It was over twenty years after Whitman's ride before it attracted any general attention. The Whitman mission was a child of the American Board of Foreign Missions. Dr. Whitman was its representative in the Oregon country. ”