_The frontispiece portrait of Whittier is from a miniature by Porter, painted about 1838. The portrait which faces page 36 is from an ambrotype taken about 1857. Both the miniature and ambrotype are in the possession of Samuel T. Pickard, Amesbury, Mass._ JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER The loneliness of the homestead in which Whittier was born, on December 17, 1807, has been described by the poet himself and emphasized by his biographers. It is a solitary spot, even to-day. The farmhouse, built by the poet’s great-great-grandfather in 1688, has been preserved by the affectionate solicitude of the Whittier Homestead Association. After the ravages of fire and of time it has been scrupulously restored. The old-fashioned garden, the lawn sloping to the brook, the very stepping-stones, the beehives, the bridle-post, the worn door-stone, the barn across the road, even the surrounding woods of pine and oak, are all, as nearly as may be, precisely what they were a hundred years ago. The shadow of Job’s Hill still darkens the pleasant little stream and the narrow meadows of the homestead. In the dusk of August evenings the deer come out to feed among the alders. The neighborhood remains sparsely settled. No other house is within sight or hearing. Even in summer the rural quiet is scarcely broken, and the winter landscape makes an almost sombre impression of physical seclusion. The intellectual isolation of the poet’s youth has likewise been impressed upon every reader of “Snow-Bound.” The books in that Quaker farmhouse were few and unattractive. The local newspaper came once a week. The teachers of the district school often knew scarcely more literature than their scholars. In the Friends’ meeting-house at Amesbury, which the Whittiers faithfully attended, there was little of that intellectual stimulus which the sermons of an highly educated clergy then offered to the orthodox. The hour of the New England lyceum—that curiously effective though short-lived popular university—had not yet come. Yet our own generation, bewildered by far too many newspapers, magazines, and books, is apt to forget that a few vitalizing ideas may more than make good the lack of printed matter. Whittier, who was to become the poet of Freedom, felt even in boyhood, in that secluded valley of the Merrimac, the pulse of the great European movement of emancipation which has transformed, and is still transforming, our modern world. “My father,” he wrote afterwards, “was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence.” In his poem “Democracy” he reasserts his own and his father’s faith: —