Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/20

xii which he found in books, was one of many hardships, but within the sanctuary of a gracious and dignified home. The secluded valley in which he lived was three miles from the nearest village; from the date of the erection of the homestead till now no neighbor's roof has been in sight. The outdoor life was that of a farmer with cattle, tempered indeed in the short summer by the kindly gifts of nature, so happily shown in the poem of the "Barefoot Boy," but for the most part a life of toil and endurance which left its marks indelibly in the shattered constitution of the poet. Twice a week the family drove to a Friends' meeting at Amesbury, eight miles distant, and in winter without warm wraps or protecting robes. The old barn, built before that celebrated in "Snow-Bound," had no doors, and the winter snows drifted upon its floor, for neither beasts nor men, in the custom of the time, were expected to resist cold except by their native vigor. Whittier's companions of his own age were a brother and two sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth Whittier, was his nearest associate for the better part of his life, and the household held also that figure so beautiful and helpful in many families, an Aunt Mercy, as also a lively, adventurous bachelor. Uncle Moses. The father of the house, as we are told, was a man of few words; the mother, whose life was spared till that happy time when mother and son change places in care-taking, had a rarely refined nature, in which the Quaker graces of calmness and order were developed into a noble beauty of living.

The appendix to Whittier's Poetical Works contains a few out of a large number of poems written by him when he was a schoolboy. They display, as indeed did most of his writing for a few years to come, little more than a versifying facility and a certain sense of correct form as copied from correct, but rather lifeless models. They were, for all that, witnesses to the intellectual activity of a rudely trained boy, and showed that his mind was intent on high, oftentimes poetic themes. His mother and his sister Mary encouraged him, but his father, a hard-headed, hard-working farmer, of sound judgment and independent habits of thinking, was too severely aware of the straitened condition of the family to think of anything else for his son than a life of toil like his own. Mary Whittier, with a sister's pride, sent one of her brother's poems, unknown to the author, to the "Free Press" of Newburyport, a new paper lately started which commended itself by its tone to the Quaker Whittier, so that he had subscribed to it. The poem was printed, and the first that the poet knew of it was when he caught the paper from the postman riding by the field where he and his father were working. It was such a moment as comes to a young poet, believing in himself and having that aspiration for recognition which is one of the holiest as it is one of the subtlest elements in the poetic constitution. The poem was followed by another, which the author himself sent. Its acceptance was followed by an unheralded visit by the editor, who had learned that the writer was scarcely more than a boy, and whose own taste in poetry led him to set a high value on this versification of scripture, for the poem was that preserved under the title "The Deity."

Whittier was at work in the fields when the editor, himself a young man, called. He held back, but was induced by his sister to make himself presentable and come in to see the visitor. It was one of those first encounters which in the history of notable men are charged with most interesting potentialities. Garrison, for he was the editor, had not yet done more than take the first step on his thorny path to greatness, and Whittier was still working in the fields, though harboring poetic visitants. Garrison was but a few years older, and in later life those few years counted nothing, but now they were enough to lead him to take the tone of an adviser, and both to Greenleaf and his father, who entered the room, he spoke of the promise of the youth and the importance of his acquiring an academic education.

It was against the more rigorous interpretation of the Friends' doctrine that literary culture should be made an end, and the notion that the boy should be sent to an academy was not encouraged; but a few months later, Garrison having left Newburyport for Boston, and Whittier making a new connection with the Haverhill "Gazette," the editor of that paper, Mr. A. W. Thayer, gave the same advice and pressed the consideration that a new academy was shortly to be opened in Haverhill. He offered the boy a home in his own