JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

1807-1892

John Greenleaf Whittier has been called "The Poet Laureate of New England," "The Quaker Poet," "The Burns of America." Any one of these titles may be aptly applied to him, but perhaps the first is most suggestive of his real service to American literature. He is called the Burns of America because, like the Scotch poet, he was born on a farm and reared amid the usual isolation and hardships incident to farm life in his day, and because, like Burns, he wrote most successfully about the things immediately_connected with this rural life into which he was born. But he lacked the Scotch singer's alertness for things of sense, his fiery passion, his keen ear for music, and hence in lyric power he falls far below the peasant bard. He is called the Quaker poet because he voiced the deepest religious moods of that particular sect. He was born a Quaker, and he clung to this quiet, self-denying form of religion throughout his life. He inherited from his ancestors that strict conscience and deeply religious nature which he poured forth in his hymns and moral odes. In fact, his sense for morality was so strong that it not infrequently overshadowed and obscured what little instinct for pure art he possessed. But above all he was, and is still, the poet laureate of New England life. He has taken the local legends and ballads and enshrined them in permanent art forms. He has painted the most perfect pictures of the rigid New England climate, and of the exquisite New England rural landscape, its hills and valleys, its fields and flowers, its coasts and rivers. He has given the most accurate portraits of the native New England population in all the simplicity, purity, and charm of that unsophisticated class of which he was himself a member.

Whittier was born December 17, 1807, near East Haverhill, a small country village in northeast Massachusetts. He has given us in "Snow-Bound" a broad, sweeping winter picture of his birthplace, the old homestead built by his early Puritan ancestor Thomas Whittier; and a minutely

drawn summer picture of the same spot in "Telling the Bees" and other personal poems. All the members of the family are mentioned and faithfully drawn in "SnowBound"-the father and mother, John Whittier and Abigail Haney, Uncle Moses Whittier, Aunt Mercy Hussey, the brother, Matthew Franklin Whittier, and the two sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Besides these, one of the village schoolmasters, George Haskell, and Miss Harriet Livermore, that "half-welcome guest," are also included in the family circle of the particular week when the family were snowbound.

Whittier's boyhood and early surroundings are interesting because they show what can come out of many a country home where there are energy and perseverance and ambition in the hearts of boys and girls similarly situated. The school advantages were meager. Only a few months in the year were the children privileged to attend the district school. There were few books in the homes, but the few in the Whittier household were mostly wellchosen religious books. John Greenleaf made the best of his opportunities for an education, however, and he learned much that was valuable to him, both in school and on the farm. He showed at an early age his propensity for poetry, making on his slate rimes on the people he knew and the books he read. One of his teachers, Joshua Coffin," later immortalized in the poem "To My Old Schoolmaster," one day read to the Whittier family some of Burns's songs. The lad was enchanted. So eager was he for more of this delightful Scotch verse that the teacher offered to leave the volume with him for a few days. He conned the hard' Scotch dialect until he could read it with ease, and from that time on he felt that he too wanted to become a poet. In a later poem on Burns he acknowledges his debt.

"New light on home-seen Nature beamed,

New glory over Woman;

And daily life and duty seemed

No longer poor and common."

After school time the boy was put to work at the hard tasks of the farm, but he was not particularly strong, and once he injured himself, so that thereafter he was not expected to undertake the very heaviest tasks. He took up the trade of making shoes, and this enabled him a little

later on to earn part of his expenses for a term in the Haverhill Academy. He had been writing more or less ambitious verse ever since the volume of Burns fell into his hands. His elder sister Mary thought some of his efforts worthy of being printed, and so, without her brother's knowledge, she sent one of them, "The Exile's Departure," to the Newbury Free Press, a weekly journal of which the young William Lloyd Garrison, who afterwards became a famous leader of the abolitionists, was the editor. The verses were accepted, and when the young poet saw his composition in print in the poets' corner, he was so overcome with emotion that for some minutes he could not go on with the task of fence mending in which he was at the moment engaged. He admitted in later years that no keener pleasure ever came into his life.

Fortunately for him the young editor of the Free Press sought him out, asked for more contributions, and urged his parents to send the boy off to the newly established Academy at Haverhill. The father objected, for he did not think there was much in education and literature so far as making an honest living was concerned; but the good mother joined in the persuasions, and the boy was permitted to go to school provided he would earn his way. He went into Mr. Garrison's home, and by means of money earned in making slippers at twenty-five cents a pair, he paid the extra expense for his first term in the Academy. He spent one other term in this school, earning the money this time partly by teaching and partly by clerical work. And this was all the formal education he received. He never would

have been the educated man he became, however, had he not been a great reader, and had he not kept up his studies practically all his life. Every one of the other prominent New England writers went to college, and had the advantage of travel in Europe, but Whittier never saw inside a college during his youth, and never quite managed to fulfill his desire for a trip to Europe. He lived and died in New England, rarely putting his foot outside his native section.

It is needless to follow minutely the political and journalistic career of Whittier. Suffice it to say that early in life he attached himself to what was then an unpopular cause,— namely, the abolition of slavery, and he devoted his best talents to this cause through thick and thin. He gave up his hope for political preferment by espousing this cause