When “The Atlantic Monthly” was founded in 1857, Whittier contributed to its early numbers, not his timely and impassioned “Moloch in State Street” and “Le Marais du Cygne,” but rather “The Gift of Tritemius,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Telling the Bees.” In other words, it was as a man of letters and not as a controversialist that he joined this distinguished company of fellow contributors. Whittier was just turning fifty, in that year. The hair was thin above his noticeably high forehead; his face and figure spare as in youth; his deep-set dark eyes still aglow; the lips clean-shaven, nervous, resolute. Like another invalid, he was destined to long life, but of the thirty-five years then remaining to him, the succeeding ten were the most fruitful. Aside from those poems, already mentioned, inspired by the course and outcome of the War for the Union, his most characteristic productions during this decade are suggested by such titles as “My Psalm,” “My Playmate,” “The River Path,” “Cobbler Keezar’s Vision,” “Mountain Pictures,” “Andrew Rykman’s Prayer,” and “The Eternal Goodness.” These are grave, sweet, quiet poems, devout and consolatory. Whittier’s mother died in 1857, and his favorite sister, the gifted Elizabeth, in 1864, thus leaving the Amesbury house desolate. The poet’s memories of his birthplace, only six miles away, but now in other hands, grew increasingly tender in his new loneliness, and he set himself to sketch, in an idyl longer than it was his wont to write, the scenes and persons dearest to his boyhood. “A homely picture of old New England homes,” he called it in a note to Fields, his friendly publisher. The poem was “Snow-Bound,” and it proved at once to be what it has since remained, the most popular of his productions; notable, not so much for sensuous beauty or for any fresh range of thought, as for its vividness, its fidelity of homely detail, its unerring feeling for the sentiment of the hearthside.