portraits that are visible day after day on the walls of our own
homes. He reproduces in his verse the landscapes he saw, the legends of
witches and Indians he listened to, the schoolfellows he played with,
the voices of the woods and fields, and the round of toil and pleasure
in a country boy's life; and in other poems his later life, with its
impassioned devotion to freedom and lofty faith, is reflected as lucidly
as his youth is in "Snow-bound" and "The Barefoot Boy."

He himself was "The Barefoot Boy," and what Robert Burns said of himself
Whittier might repeat: "The poetic genius of my country found me, as the
prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the plow, and threw her inspiring
mantle over me." He was a farmer's son, born at a time when farm-life in
New England was more frugal than it is now, and with no other heritage
than the good name and example of parents and kinsmen, in whom simple
virtues--thrift, industry, and piety--abounded.

His birthplace still stands near Haverhill, Mass.,--a house in one of
the hollows of the surrounding hills, little altered from what it was in
1807, the year he was born, when it was already at least a century and a
half old.

[Illustration: WHITTIER'S BIRTHPLACE, NEAR HAVERHILL, MASS.]

He had no such opportunities for culture as Holmes and Lowell had in
their youth. His parents were intelligent and upright people of
limited means, who lived in all the simplicity of the Quaker faith, and
there was nothing in his early surroundings to encourage and develop a
literary taste. Books were scarce, and the twenty volumes on his
father's shelves were, with one exception, about Quaker doctrines and
Quaker heroes. The exception was a novel, and that was hidden away from
the children, for fiction was forbidden fruit. No library or scholarly
companionship was within reach; and if his gift had been less than
genius, it could never have triumphed over the many disadvantages with
which it had to contend. Instead of a poet he would have been a farmer
like his forefathers. But literature was a spontaneous impulse with him,
as natural as the song of a bird; and he was not wholly dependent on
training and opportunity, as he would have been had he possessed mere
talent.

Frugal from necessity, the life of the Whittiers was not sordid nor
cheerless to him, moreover; and he looks back to it as tenderly as if it
had been full of luxuries. It was sweetened by strong affections, simple
tastes, and an