JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
1807-1892
In an old New England farm-house kitchen, a barefoot boy, dressed in
homespun, one day sat listening to a lazy Scotch beggar who piped the
songs of Burns in return for his meal of bread and cheese and cider.
The beggar was good-natured, and the boy was an eager listener, and
_Bonnie Doon_, _Highland Mary_, and _Auld Lang Syne_ were trilled
forth as the master himself may have sung them among the Scottish
"banks and braes." Never before had the farmer boy heard of the famous
peasant, and a new door was opened through which he passed into an
undreamed of world. A few months later the school-master gave him
a copy of Burns's poems, and with this gift the boy became a poet
himself. For these songs of roadsides and meadows, of ploughed fields
and wet hedgerows, were to him familiar pictures of every-day life,
whose poetry, once revealed, had to express itself in words.
The boy was the son of John and Abigail Whittier, Quaker farmers
owning a little homestead in the valley of the Merrimac, near the town
of Haverhill, Mass. In honor of an ancestor he had been named John
Greenleaf Whittier, the Greenleaf, as he tells us in one of his poems,
having become Americanized from the French _feuille verte_, _green
leaf_, a suggestion, perhaps, of far away days in which the family
might have been men of the wood, keepers of the deer or forest
guarders in France during feudal ages. In his boyhood, life in the
Merrimac valley was primitive enough. The house was small and plain,
the kitchen being the living room, and the parlor dedicated to Sunday
and holiday use only. The floor was sanded and on the wide fire-place
benches the men and children of the family sat at night to whittle
axe-handles, mend shoes, crack nuts, or learn the next day's lessons.
Often a stranger was found among them; some Quaker travelling on
business, or a stranger on his way to some distant town, or perhaps
a professional beggar to whom the hospitality of the place was well
known. Once when the mother had refused a night's shelter to an
unprepossessing vagabond, John was sent out to bring him back. He
proved to be an Italian artisan, and after supper he told them of the
Italian grape gatherings and festivals, and of the wonderful beauty
of Italy, paying for his entertainment by presenting to the mother a
recipe for making bread from chestnuts.
Sometimes the visitor would be an uncanny old crone who still believed
in witches and fairies, and who told how her butter refused to come,
or how her candle had been snuffed out by a witch in the form of a
big black bug. One old woman in the neighborhood was renowned for
her tales of ghosts, devils, fairies, brownies, sprenties, enchanted
towers, headless men, haunted mills that were run at night by ghostly
millers and witches riding on broom-sticks by the light of the full
moon, and descending unguarded chimneys to lay their spells upon
cream-pot and yeast-bowl.
After such an evening's entertainment the boy needed courage to leave
the bright kitchen fire and climb up the narrow stairs to the loft
where he slept, and where the sound of the night-wind crept through
the frosty rafters, and the voice of the screech-owl came dismally
from the trees outside.
Haverhill boasted at that time its village conjurer, who could remove
the spells of those wicked spirits, and whose gaunt form could be seen
any day along the meadows and streams gathering herbs to be stewed
and brewed into love-potions, cures for melancholy, spells against
witchcraft, and other remedies for human ills. He was held in great
respect by the inhabitants, and feared almost as much as the witches
themselves.
An ever-welcome guest at the Whittiers was the school-master, whose
head was full of the local legends, and whose tales of Indian raids
and of revolutionary struggles were regarded as authentic history.
This Yankee pedagogue, moreover, could, with infinite spirit and zest,
retell the classic stories of the Greek and Latin poets.
Twice a year came to the little homestead the Yankee pedler, with his
supply of pins, needles, thread, razors, soaps, and scissors for the
elders, and jack-knives for the boys who had been saving their pennies
to purchase those treasures. He had gay ribbons for worldly minded
maids, but these were never bought for Quaker Whittier's daughters.
But to Poet John's thinking the pedler's choicest wares were the songs
of his own composing, printed with wood-cuts, which he sold at an
astonishingly low price, or even, upon occasions, gave away. These
songs celebrated earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, hangings, marriages,
deaths, and funerals. Often they were improvised as the pedler sat
with the rest around the hearth fire. If a wedding had occurred during
his absence he was ready to versify it, and equally ready to lament
the loss of a favorite cow. To Whittier this gift of rhyming seemed
marvellous, and in after years he described this wandering minstrel as
encircled, to his young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality.
Such was the home-life of this barefooted boy, who drove the cows
night and morning through the dewy meadows, and followed the oxen,
breaking the earth into rich brown furrows, whose sight and smell
suggested to him always the generous bounty of nature. From early
spring, when the corn was planted in fields bordered by wild
rose-bushes, to late autumn, when the crop lay bound into glistening
sheaves, his life was one of steady toil, lightened sometimes by a
day's fishing in the mountain streams or by a berrying excursion up
among the hills.
In cold weather he went to school in the little school-house that he
celebrates in one of his poems, and very often, as he confessed, he
was found writing verses instead of doing sums on his slate.
This old phase of New-England life has now passed away, but he has
preserved its memory in three poems, which are in a special sense
biographical. These poems are, _The Barefoot Boy_, _My Schoolmaster_,
and _Snow-Bound_. The first two are simple, boyish memories, but
the last is a description not only of his early home, but of the
New-England farm life, and is a Puritan idyl.
All are full of the idealization of childhood, for the poet could
never break loose from the charm which had enthralled him as a boy.
The poetry of common life which lay over the meadow lands and fields
of grain, which gave a voice to the woodland brook, and glorified
the falling rain and snow, was felt by Whittier, when, as a child, he
paused from his work to listen to the robin's song among the wheat or
watch the flocks of clouds making their way across the summer sky.
When he was nineteen years of age the country-side mail-carrier one
day rode up to the farm and took from his saddle-bags the weekly
paper, which he tossed to the boy, who stood mending a fence. With
trembling eagerness Whittier opened it, and saw in the "Poet's Corner"
his first printed poem. He had sent it with little hope that it would
be accepted, and the sight of it filled him with joy, and determined
his literary career. A few months later the editor of the paper,
William Lloyd Garrison, drove out to the homestead to see the young
verse-maker. Whittier was called from the field where he was hoeing,
and in the interview that followed Garrison insisted that such talent
should not be thrown away, and urged the youth to take a course of
study at some academy. But, although the farm supplied the daily needs
of the family, money was scarce, and the sum required for board and
tuition was impossible to scrape together. A young farm assistant,
however, offered to teach Whittier the trade of shoemaking, and his
every moment of leisure was thereafter spent in learning this craft.
During the following winter the lad furnished the women of the
neighborhood with good, well-made shoes, and with the money thus
earned he entered Haverhill Academy in April, 1827, being then in his
twentieth year. For the next six months his favorite haunts in field
and wood were unvisited, except on the Saturdays and Sundays
spent with his family. He gained some reputation as a poet by the
publication of the ode which he wrote in honor of the new academy,
and although he returned to the farm after six months of study, it was
only to earn more money for further schooling.
His poems and sketches now began to appear in the different newspapers
and periodicals, and he did some editing for various papers. This
work brought him into notice among literary people, but it was his
political convictions that first gave him a national reputation.
From the first Whittier stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison
in his crusade against slavery, and many of his best poems appeared in
the _Liberator_, Garrison's own paper. These poems, with others, were
collected in a volume called _Voices of Freedom_. It was these songs,
which rushed onward like his own mountain brooks, that made Whittier
known from one end of the country to the other as an apostle of
liberty. All Whittier's poems of this period belong to the political
history of the country, of which they are as much a part as the war
records.
In all this work there is no trace of bitterness or enmity. His songs
of freedom were but the bugle-notes calling the nation to a higher
humanity. Like the old Hebrew prophets, he spared not his own, and
many of his most burning words are a summons to duty to his brothers
in the North. If he could remind the South that the breath of slavery
tainted the air
"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"
he could also, in _Barbara Frietchie_, pay loving tribute to the noble
heart of one of her best-loved sons. His was the dream of the great
nation to be--his spirit that of the preacher who saw his people
unfaithful to the high trust they had received as guardians of the
land which the world had been taught to regard as the home of liberty.
It was this high conception that gave to his work its greatest power,
and that made Whittier, above all others, the poet of freedom; so that
although the mission of these poems has ceased, and as literature they
will not appeal to succeeding generations as forcibly as they did to
their own, as a part of national history they will be long preserved.
Whittier's other poems deal so largely with the home-life of his
day that he is called the poet of New England. All its traditions,
memories, and beliefs are faithfully recorded by him. In _Snow-Bound_
we have the life of the New-England farmer. In _Mabel Martin_ we
see again the old Puritan dogmatism hunting down witches, burning or
hanging them, and following with relentless persecution the families
of the unhappy wretches who thus came under the ban. In _Mogg Megone_
is celebrated in beautiful verse one of those legends of Indian life
which linger immortally around the pines of New England, while the
_Grave by the Lake_, the _Changeling_, the _Wreck of Rivermouth_,
the _Dead Ship of Harpswell_, and others in the collection called the
_Tent on the Beach_, revive old traditions of those early days when
history mingled with legend and the belief in water-spirits and
ghostly warnings had not yet vanished.
In some exquisite ballads, such as _School Days_, we have the memory
of the past, fresh as the wild violets which the poet culled as a boy,
while _Maud Muller_ is a very idyl of a New-England harvest-field in
the poet's youth. In _Among the Hills_ we have some of Whittier's best
poems of country life, while many minor poems celebrate the hills and
streams of which he was so fond. Whittier wrote, also, many beautiful
hymns, and his poems for children, such as _King Solomon and the Ants_
and _The Robin_, show how easy it was for his great heart to enter
into the spirit of childhood. _Child Life_, his compilation of
poems for childhood, is one of the best ever made, while another
compilation, called _Songs of Three Centuries_, shows his wide
familiarity and appreciation of all that is great in English poetry.
After the sale of the old home of his childhood Whittier lived in the
house at Amesbury, which for many years his sister shared. His last
collection of poems, called _Sundown_, was published in 1890, for
some friends only, as a memento of his eightieth birthday. He died two
years later, and was buried in the yard of the Friends' meeting-house
in Amesbury, a short distance from his birthplace.