a bloom that never fades from the memory of the born New Englander. Indeed, such was Whittier’s fidelity to the impressions made upon him in his youth, so unerring was his instinct for what was truly characteristic of the time and place, that these poems written about his boyhood portray, with a vividness rarely equalled in our literature, not only a mode of outward life, but a type of thought and feeling which possesses a permanent significance to all who would understand the American mind. It was easier for Whittier, after all, to picture the East Haverhill homestead and its other inmates than to draw the portrait of himself in youth. We know that he was tall, frail, clear-colored, with those wonderful dark “Bachiler eyes” which now prove not to have been true Bachiler eyes at all. He was shy,—with a painful shyness which lasted throughout his life,—but he was prouder than a cavalier. Consciousness of intellectual power came to him early; behind him was a long line of clean-lived farmers whose lips, although “to caution trained” by Quaker breeding, could speak decisively when there was need. Poverty had taught him that respect and sympathy for the poor which is one of the noblest forms of class-pride. It would have been hard to find in all New England a country boy whose mind was so perfectly prepared for the visitation of a master-poet; and the poet, by some special gift of fortune, proved to be Robert Burns. The story of that revealing experience is familiar enough: how a “pawky” wandering Scotchman sang “Bonny Doon” and “Highland Mary” and “Auld Lang Syne” over his mug of cider in the Whittier kitchen; and then how Joshua Coffin, the boy’s first schoolmaster, loaned him that copy of Burns which proved to be his passport to the wonder-world:— “I saw through all familiar things The romance underlying; The joys and griefs that plume the wings Of Fancy skyward flying.”