d to his sons a hatred of kingcraft
and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with
humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is
veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days," "Snow-Bound,"
"Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the Bees." It was a chance copy of Burns
that revealed to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for
verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his sister sent his "Exile's
Departure" to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of
the "Newburyport Free Press." The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail
author was rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid
his way, in old Essex County fashion, by making shoes.

He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter
college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much
facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he
possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with
poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's
stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He
obeyed the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of
humanity was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into
a national poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and
finding it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained
in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist,
of the ostracism visited upon the active Abolitionists. Whittier
entered the fight with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical
judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from
those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was
destined to return after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the
prose of Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in
the United States was only a single and immediate phase of a universal
movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his imagination. He wrote,
at white heat, political and social verse that glowed with humanitarian
passion: lyrics in praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead,
campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy and the capitalists,
superb sectional poems like "Massachusetts to Virginia," and, more nobly
still, poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image
of country and the human race."

Whittier had now "found himse