Although he had been for some time contributing to the press, Mr. Whittier was but twenty-three years old when he was thunderstruck by a request to take the place of Mr. George D. Prentice, in editing _The New England Weekly Review_ for a time; of which request he has said that he could not have been more astonished had he been told he was appointed Prime Minister to the Khan of Tartary. In 1835 and in 1836 he was elected to the State Legislature of Massachusetts, and he was engaged, during all this period, in active politics in a manner that seems totally at variance with the possibilities of the singer of sweet songs as we know him to-day. He declined reëlection to the Legislature, upon being appointed Secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society, removing to Philadelphia, and remaining there two years, at the end of which time the office of _The Pennsylvania Freeman_, which he edited, was sacked and burned by a mob. Few men in the world had a closer acquaintance with this same many-headed monster than our gentle poet, for he has been followed by mobs, hustled by them, assailed by them, carrying himself with defiant courage through them all; and it is a tremendous range of experience that a man finds, as Mr. Whittier was able to do, between being assaulted by a midnight mob and being chosen the Presidential Elector for a sovereign State. After the suppression of his paper--this was at a time when the Legislature of Georgia had offered a reward of five thousand dollars for the arrest of the editor of _The Liberator_,--Mr. Whittier sold the old Haverhill homestead and removed to Amesbury, a lovely town, the descendant of Queen Guinevere’s Almbresbury, neighbor of Stonehenge and old Sarum, which seems a proper spot for him as for a new Sir Galahad; and from this time he began to send out those periodical volumes of verses which have won him the heart of the world. Here his lovely sister Elizabeth, herself a poet, with his mother, and his Aunt Mercy--the three loved of all “Snowbound’s” lovers,--brightened the home for years, one by one withdrawing from it at last for their long home, and leaving him alone, but for the subsequent sweet companionship of his nieces, who themselves went away in their turn for homes of their own. The poet’s dwelling in Amesbury was exceedingly simple and exquisitely neat, the exterior of a pale cream color, with many trees and shrubs about it, while, within, one room opens into another till you reach the study that should be haunted by the echoes of all sweet sounds, for here have been written the most of those verses full of the fitful music, Of winds that out of dreamland blew.