tlemanly, and
courageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York.

Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like
Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf
Whittier (1807- ). He was born in a solitary farmhouse near Haverhill,
in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed mostly at
his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local
color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the Merrimack
from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of
hillside farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the low, green
prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The
scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier: the
cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and dams,
the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, the sands of
Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide
the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a {519} local corruption of
gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such
education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two
years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a
picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the
only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many
others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities
look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of
knowledge.

"Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.

"Within, the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial."

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he
began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published at
Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston,
and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he
edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of
George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much
promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the {520} _Connecticut Mirror_,
whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartfor