A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

As big a rogue as e’er was made;

And Tufts, who, I will be civil,

Was worse than an incarnate devil.

Poetry came to Whittier through the chance visit of a Yankee gypsy, “‘a pawky auld carle’ of a wandering Scotchman. To him I owe my first introduction to the songs of Burns. After eating his bread and cheese and drinking his mug of cider he gave us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne.” When the boy was fourteen his first schoolmaster, Joshua Coffin, brought a volume of Burns one day to the house and was persuaded to leave it for a while as a loan. With that closer introduction to the world of poetry Whittier’s own verse-writing began.

At eighteen he composed the first bit that was destined to appear in print. It was an imitation of Moore, “The Exile’s Departure,” which was sent without his knowledge to William Lloyd Garrison’s Free Press at Newburyport and published in June, 1826. The young editor, himself only twenty-one, was greatly impressed by the promise of these lines and hunted up the author, coming to the farm just when the embarrassed youth was hunting out a stolen hen’s nest under the barn. Garrison’s interest was of the greatest importance. Whittier was encouraged to write the nearly one hundred pieces of verse which appeared in the Haverhill Gazette in 1827 and 1828, and to earn by shoemaking the money necessary for his first summer term in the new Haverhill Academy in 1827. The little learning he thus secured he converted by school-teaching into enough to take him for another term the next year, and then in 1828, through the continuing influence of Garrison, he was given his first position as an editor, on the American Manufacturer in Boston. He was still a simple country boy, and his published address, “to the young mechanics of New England,” suggests that he had not been encouraged to forget this fact during his first four months in town.

He has felt, in common with you all, the injustice of that illiberal feeling, which has been manifested toward mechanics by the wealthy and arrogant of other classes. He has felt his cheeks burn, and his pulse quicken, when witnessing the open, undisguised contempt with which his friends have been received—not from any defect in their moral character, their minds, or their persons, but simply because they depended upon their own exertions for their means of existence, and upon their own industry and talents for a passport to public favor.

He held his post here only from January to August, 1829, when he was summoned home by his father’s illness. Editorship of the Haverhill Gazette followed for the first half of 1830, when he was called to the New England Review in Hartford, Connecticut. This position he occupied with one interruption until the end of 1831, at which time he took his leave of journalism.

He was twenty-four years old—in the restless period between youth and real manhood. He had known little but hardship and had come out of it with impaired health. There was little to cheer him in the tragic career of Burns, in the almost desperate enthusiasm of Garrison, or in the cynicism of Byron, to which he had lately become subject. To cap all, he had been “crossed in love.” He could not even have the grim comfort of realizing that he was passing through a youthful phase when he wrote to a friend:

Disappointment in a thousand ways has gone over my heart, and left it dust. Yet I still look forward with high anticipations. I have placed the goal of my ambitions high—but with the blessing of God it shall be reached. The world has at last breathed into my bosom a portion of its own bitterness, and I now feel as if I would wrestle manfully in the strife of men. If my life is spared, the world shall know me in a loftier capacity than as a writer of rhymes. There—is not that boasting?—But I have said it with a strong pulse and a swelling heart, and I shall strive to realize it.

This temporary abandonment of poetry was after all only an evidence of his regard for it. With all the other young writers of his day, he was hoping for new achievement in American literature and wondering in the back of his mind if he were not to be a contributor to it. At the moment Bryant had turned to journalism the New England group were not yet articulate, and the call of politics was loud. “There was nowhere in America a writer of verse with more immediate promise than Whittier, [yet] he was a sick man in the old house at the back of Job’s Hill, disgusted with poetry and planning how he could best get to Congress.”