in from the field to meet him. It is not quite a parallel to the story of Cincinnatus, but important things came of the meeting. Through the long anti-slavery agitation that followed, Garrison and he were close friends, often working side by side. Two years after the meeting, Garrison, who was then editing a temperance paper in Boston, secured for him the editorship of a political journal there and he was soon in the thick of the tariff discussion, supporting Clay against Jackson in the campaign of 1832. He wrote in one of his letters, "I would rather have the memory of a Howard, a Wilberforce, and a Clarkson than the undying fame of Byron;" and though he was thinking of Byron's spirit rather than of his poetry, the declaration shows clearly that his interests lay less in literature than in political and social reform.

The editorial work begun at Boston was continued at Hartford, but proved too trying for his delicate health, and he returned to the farm. When the farm was sold four years later, he removed with his mother and sister to Amesbury. Mean

while, he contributed much verse to the newspapers. Enlisted against But his interest in politics more and more overSlavery. shadowed his other interests. "I have knocked Pegasus on the head," he wrote, "as a tanner does his barkmill donkey when he is past service." He was elected to the legislature of Massachusetts, and there were excellent prospects of his being nominated for Congress. The anti-slavery agitation, however, was growing, fostered especially by Garrison's Liberator which was started in 1831, and as Whittier was soon seen to be an ardent supporter of the unpopular cause, his political prospects faded. No selfish considerations could prevent a man of his character from speaking out when he felt that the nation was guilty of harboring a great wrong. Quaker though he was, the fighting spirit was strong in him. could be read in his piercing, deep-set eyes, and it can be read

It

in his verse. During his school days he had published anony mously a poem called The Song of the Vermonters, 1779:—

"Ho-all to the borders! Vermonters, come down,
With your breeches of deerskin and jackets of brown;
With your red woolen caps, and your moccasins, come,
To the gathering summons of trumpet and drum."

He disliked to acknowledge the authorship of so martial a poem, perhaps because he realized that the spirit of it was only too genuine.

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He flung himself into the new cause, heart and soul. He could not counsel taking up arms; actual war, indeed, was a thing he dreaded. "For one, I thank God that he has given me a deep and invincible horror of human butchery." But all means short of war were to be tried. Both openly and privately he helped with advice some of the great leaders of the North Sumner, Seward, Gerrit Smith. Occasionally he took part in public meetings. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman, and was there when Pennsylvania Hall was burnt by a mob in protest against an anti-slavery convention. He was once pelted with eggs in the streets of Concord, New Hampshire, and thirty years afterward sent the coat which he had then worn, and which had been kept as a relic, to the needy freedmen of the South. But most of all he assisted the cause with his poetry, to which he turned once more with the inspiration born of a noble purpose. The barkmill donkey was transformed into a knight's charger, and not even the rider himself ever sneered at it again.

Here was the real beginning of his career. Such poems as he had already published-Moll Pitcher, a poem of New England legendary life (1832), and the more ambitious Mogg Megone (1836)—were only conventional ana almost worthless exercises in rhyme. It was the Ballads and the Anti-Slavery Poems of 1837 and 1838 that wou

The Laureate of Freedom.

him a hearing and marked him as a poet with a mission-the accepted laureate of the Liberty party. Among the best of these poems were Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Slave-Ships, Expostulation, The Hunters of Men, Stanzas for the Times, Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother, The Pastoral Letter. The last named was called forth by a letter written by the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts in which they pleaded that the perplexed subject of abolition be not brought up for debate in the churches. Whittier's poem was a scathing rebuke of what he conceived to be most unchristian conduct:

"For, if ye claim the 'pastoral right'

To silence Freedom's voice of warning,
And from your precincts shut the light
Of Freedom's day around you dawning;

"If when an earthquake voice of power
And signs in heaven and earth are showing
That forth, in its appointed hour,

The Spirit of the Lord is going!
And, with that Spirit, Freedom's light
On kindred, tongue, and people breaking,
Whose slumbering millions, at the sight,
In glory and in strength are waking!

"What marvel, if the people learn

To claim the right of free opinion?
What marvel, if at times they spurn

The ancient yoke of your dominion ?”

No stronger or clearer voice for freedom had been raised in American letters since Tom Paine nerved the soldiers at Valiey Forge and Philip Freneau hurled his hot verses at the head of George the Third.

After 1844 Whittier gave up editorial duties altogether and became an established literary worker in the quiet of his Amesbury home. In 1847 he began to contribute regularly to the National Era, a weekly organ of the Anti-Slavery Society estab