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.