They are terrible days to look back upon, the period of that long, fierce struggle beneath a cloud of obloquy and outrage; but to those who lived in that cloud it was lined with light, and in all our sorrows there was the joy of struggle and of brotherhood, of eloquence and poetry and song, and the greater joy yet of knowing that all the forces of the universe must be fighting on the side of right. The old homestead where Whittier was born, in 1807, is still standing, and although built more than two hundred years ago, it is in good condition. It is on a high table-land, surrounded by what in the late fall and winter seems a dreary landscape. Carlyle’s Craigenputtock, the Burns cottage, the Whittier homestead, all have a certain correlation, each of them the home of genius and of comparative poverty, and each so bleak and bare as to send the imagination of the dwellers out on strong wings to lovelier scenes. Little boxes and paper-weights are made from the boards of the garret-floor of the Whittier homestead, as they are from the Burns belongings; and twigs of the overshadowing elm are varnished and sold for pen-holders. But the whole house would have to go to the lathe to meet the demand, if it were answered generally, for it is the old farmhouse celebrated by “Snowbound,” our one national idyll, the perfect poem of New England winter life. An allusion to that strange and powerful character, Harriet Livermore, in this poem, has brought down upon the poet’s head the wrath of one of her collateral descendants, who has written a book to prove that nothing which was said of that fantastic being in her lifetime was true, and that so far from quarreling with Lady Hester Stanhope as to which of them was to ride beside the Lord on his reëntry into Jerusalem, she never even saw Lady Hester. But why any one, descendant or otherwise, should take offence at the tender feeling and beauty of the poet’s mention of her is as much a mystery as her life. It was in the fields about this homestead that fame first found our poet. For there he bought, from the pack of a traveling peddler, the first copy of Burns that he had ever seen, and that snatched him away from hard realities into a land of music; and here the mail-man brought him the copy of that paper containing his earliest poem, one whose subject was the presence of the Deity in the still small whisper in the soul; and here Garrison came with the words of praise and found him in the furrow, and began that friendship which Death alone severed, as the two fought shoulder to shoulder in the great fight of the century.