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.