d, too, he
published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled
_Legends of New England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than
as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially
those which had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward
worked to good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's
Daughter_, and similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to
Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary
residence at Hartford. One of the prose pieces, for example, deals
with the famous "Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River,
and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox
of Salmon River_. After a year and a half at Hartford, Whittier
returned to Haverhill and to farming.

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw
himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the
reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its
speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract
against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of
the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the
convention as a delegate of the Boston Abolitionists. Whittier was a
Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John
Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its
own communion. The {521} Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an
earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a
strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a
Friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring
of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner, added to the stern religious zeal of
Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown
before the walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denouncing woe upon
the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan
strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit
of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal
collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; the _Panorama and Other Poems_,
1856; and _In War Time_, 1863; Whittier's work as the poet of freedom
was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the
constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid
_Laus Deo_, thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit:

"Loud and long
Li