A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston, and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled _Legends of New England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford. One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to farming. The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the preaching of John Woolman and others, had long since quietly abolished slavery within its own communion. The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it was a strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a friend. His poems against slavery and disunion have the martial ring of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner, added to the stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jericho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal collections: _Voices of Freedom_, 1849; _The Panorama, and Other Poems_, 1856; and _In War Time_, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid