John Greenleaf Whittier: A sketch of his life, with selected poems

The loneliness of the homestead in which Whittier was born, on December 17, 1807, has been described by the poet himself and emphasized by his biographers. It is a solitary spot, even to-day. The farmhouse, built by the poet’s great-great-grandfather in 1688, has been preserved by the affectionate solicitude of the Whittier Homestead Association. After the ravages of fire and of time it has been scrupulously restored. The old-fashioned garden, the lawn sloping to the brook, the very stepping-stones, the beehives, the bridle-post, the worn door-stone, the barn across the road, even the surrounding woods of pine and oak, are all, as nearly as may be, precisely what they were a hundred years ago. The shadow of Job’s Hill still darkens the pleasant little stream and the narrow meadows of the homestead. In the dusk of August evenings the deer come out to feed among the alders. The neighborhood remains sparsely settled. No other house is within sight or hearing. Even in summer the rural quiet is scarcely broken, and the winter landscape makes an almost sombre impression of physical seclusion.

The intellectual isolation of the poet’s youth has likewise been impressed upon every reader of “Snow-Bound.” The books in that Quaker farmhouse were few and unattractive. The local newspaper came once a week. The teachers of the district school often knew scarcely more literature than their scholars. In the Friends’ meeting-house at Amesbury, which the Whittiers faithfully attended, there was little of that intellectual stimulus which the sermons of an highly educated clergy then offered to the orthodox. The hour of the New England lyceum—that curiously effective though short-lived popular university—had not yet come. Yet our own generation, bewildered by far too many newspapers, magazines, and books, is apt to forget that a few vitalizing ideas may more than make good the lack of printed matter. Whittier, who was to become the poet of Freedom, felt even in boyhood, in that secluded valley of the Merrimac, the pulse of the great European movement of emancipation which has transformed, and is still transforming, our modern world. “My father,” he wrote afterwards, “was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence.” In his poem “Democracy” he reasserts his own and his father’s faith: —

“Oh, ideal of my boyhood’s time! The faith in which my father stood, Even when the sons of Lust and Crime Had stained thy peaceful courts with blood!”

Not even the terrors of the French Revolution, it seems, could shake the silent John Whittier’s steadfast belief in the natural rights of man. He entertained in the old farmhouse William Forster, the distinguished British advocate of abolition. He transmitted to his boys a hatred of “priests and kings” which befitted the descendants of forbears who had felt the weight of the displeasure of the Puritan theocracy. Not that the Whittiers were agitators: they were taciturn, self-respecting landholders, who—in the phrase which a famous American poet, also of Quaker stock, afterward applied to himself—wore their hats as they pleased, indoors and out. But the Whittiers were so used to quiet independence that it never occurred to them to brag of it.

This moral freedom of the New England Quakers, touched as it was with the humanitarian passion of the later eighteenth century, was the poet’s spiritual heritage. Judged by material standards, his lot was one of hardship. The Whittier farm was both rocky and swampy. Only the most stubborn toil could wring from it a livelihood. In the harsh labor of the farm the two boys helped as best they could, but John Greenleaf was slender and delicate, and suffered life-long injury by attempting tasks beyond his strength. The winters were like iron; underclothing was almost unknown; the houses were poorly warmed and the churches not at all; and the food, in farmers’ homes, lacked variety and was ill-cooked. Though the poet’s body never recovered from these privations of his youth, the sufferings grew light when, in middle and later life, he weighed them against the happiness of home affection and the endless pleasures of a boy’s life out of doors. “The Barefoot Boy,” “Snow-Bound,” and “In School-Days” tell the story more charmingly and with more truth than it can ever be told in prose. Few households are better known to American readers than the inmates of the ancient homestead under Job’s Hill. In the “Flemish pictures” of the gifted son we behold the reticent, laborious father, the benignant mother,—like Goethe’s mother, a natural story-teller,—the gracious maiden aunt, the uncle with his “prodigies of rod and gun,” the grave elder sister, and the brilliant Elizabeth. These, with the boyish schoolmaster and the “half-welcome” casual guest, are still grouped for us before the great hearth in the ample living-room, waiting

“Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;”—

a bloom that never fades from the memory of the born New Englander. Indeed, such was Whittier’s fidelity to the impressions made upon him in his youth, so unerring was his instinct for what was truly characteristic of the time and place, that these poems written about his boyhood portray, with a vividness rarely equalled in our literature, not only a mode of outward life, but a type of thought and feeling which possesses a permanent significance to all who would understand the American mind.

It was easier for Whittier, after all, to picture the East Haverhill homestead and its other inmates than to draw the portrait of himself in youth. We know that he was tall, frail, clear-colored, with those wonderful dark “Bachiler eyes” which now prove not to have been true Bachiler eyes at all. He was shy,—with a painful shyness which lasted throughout his life,—but he was prouder than a cavalier. Consciousness of intellectual power came to him early; behind him was a long line of clean-lived farmers whose lips, although “to caution trained” by Quaker breeding, could speak decisively when there was need. Poverty had taught him that respect and sympathy for the poor which is one of the noblest forms of class-pride. It would have been hard to find in all New England a country boy whose mind was so perfectly prepared for the visitation of a master-poet; and the poet, by some special gift of fortune, proved to be Robert Burns.

The story of that revealing experience is familiar enough: how a “pawky” wandering Scotchman sang “Bonny Doon” and “Highland Mary” and “Auld Lang Syne” over his mug of cider in the Whittier kitchen; and then how Joshua Coffin, the boy’s first schoolmaster, loaned him that copy of Burns which proved to be his passport to the wonder-world:—

“I saw through all familiar things The romance underlying; The joys and griefs that plume the wings Of Fancy skyward flying.”

He had already scribbled verses upon the beam of his mother’s loom, and like the boy Alfred Tennyson, only two years younger than himself, in the far-away Lincolnshire rectory, he had loved to fill his slate with rhymes. But from the moment that he read Burns this boyish delight in mere jingling sounds deepened into a sense that he, too, might become a poet. At sixteen he was composing with extraordinary fluency and with considerable skill. At eighteen he had written verses which his sister Mary thought good enough to be printed, and a poem which she sent surreptitiously to William Lloyd Garrison, the twenty-year-old editor of the “Newburyport Free Press,” was accepted and published on June 8, 1826. This printing of “The Exile’s Departure” in the poet’s corner of a struggling local newspaper was a fateful event for Whittier. Everybody knows the instant and generous interest aroused in the youthful editor: how he drove out to East Haverhill, unearthed his bashful poet,—who was at that moment crawling under the barn after a stolen hen’s nest,—and urged his father to give Greenleaf something better than a district schooling. “Sir, poetry will not give him bread!” exclaimed John Whittier, as sternly as Carlyle’s father might have said it. But the upshot was that the gaunt lad got his term at the Haverhill Academy, paying his way by making shoes.

He continued to write poems in astonishing profusion, taught school himself for a term in his native township, then took a final term at the Academy, and at twenty-one the ways were parting before his feet. A scheme for the publication of his poems by subscription had failed. His health seemed too frail for effective farm labor. His ignorance of the classics, as well as his lack of funds, barred the doors of a college course. He decided to earn his bread by journalism, and became at the end of his twenty-first year the editor of “The American Manufacturer” in Boston. The choice was significant. For three years he had been heralded as an unlettered “poet,” a sort of local phenomenon who was possibly destined, as Garrison had prophesied, to rank “among the bards of his country.” Yet here he was, turning, with a Yankee’s shrewd facility, to politics and affairs.

He was led, no doubt,—as in the more momentous crisis of 1833, when he obeyed Garrison’s call and turned Abolitionist,—by an instinct deeper than any conscious analysis of his powers. He knew that he had what he called a “knack of rhyming,” and he had learned from Burns to find material for poetry all about him. Yet he possessed at this time but a scanty equipment for the long road which a poet must travel. His physical endowment was impoverished. That full-blooded life of the senses, which taught Burns and Goethe at fourteen such secrets of human rapture and dismay, was impossible for the Quaker stripling. He was color-blind. His ear barely recognized a tune. The bodily sensations of odor, taste, and touch are scarcely to be felt in his poetry. He was indeed “no Greek,” as Whitman said of him long afterward; and at the outset of his career, as at its close, he cared but little for literature as an art. To conceive of any of the arts as a religion, or as an embodiment, for sense perception, of the highest potencies of the human spirit, would have seemed almost blasphemous to this follower of the “inward light.” He wrote to Lucy Hooper that a long poem, “unless consecrated to the sacred interests of religion and humanity, would be a criminal waste of life.” Parthenon and Pantheon were in his eyes less significant and memorable than Pennsylvania Hall, the Abolitionist headquarters in Philadelphia. In an editorial in “The Freeman” in 1838, prefacing a reprint of “A Psalm of Life,” which had just been published in the New York “Knickerbocker,” Whittier declared: “It is very seldom that we find an article of poetry so full of excellent philosophy and COMMON SENSE as the following. We know not who the author may be, but he or she is no common man or woman. These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live—the moral steam enginery of an age of action.”