His standards were often different from those of his friends,
but their ideals were on the whole made in common.
His friends were to Whittier, more than to most men, an unfailing
source of daily happiness and gratitude. With the advance of years,
and the death of his unmarried sister, his friends became all in all
to him. They were his mother, his sister, and his brother; but in a
certain sense they were always friends of the imagination. He saw some
of them only at rare intervals, and sustained his relations with them
chiefly in his hurried correspondence. He never suffered himself to
complain of what they were not; but what they were, in loyalty to
chosen aims, and in their affection for him, was an unending source of
pleasure. With the shortcomings of others he dealt gently, having too
many shortcomings of his own, as he was accustomed to say, with true
humility. He did not, however, look upon the failings of his friends
with indifferent eyes. "How strange it is!" he once said. "We see
those whom we love going to the very verge of the precipice of
self-destruction, yet it is not in our power to hold them back!"
A life of invalidism made consecutive labor of any kind an
impossibility. For years he was only able to write for half an hour or
less, without stopping to rest, and these precious moments were
devoted to some poem or other work for the press, which was almost his
only source of income. His correspondence suffered, from a literary
point of view; but his letters were none the less delightful to his
friends.
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