sit upon a cracker barrel in the grocery store at Amesbury, and talk politics. “I am a _man_,” he wrote to his biographer Underwood in 1883, “and not a mere verse-maker.” This glimpse at the later revelations of his character is essential to an understanding of the spiritual crisis which confronted him in 1833, when he was only twenty-six. He loved power, and had already exercised it in the congenial field of politics. The road to preferment lay that way. It is true that he had continued to compose abundantly, both in prose and in verse. His writings were favorably noticed. Yet he saw no career for himself as a man of letters. “I have done with poetry and literature,” he wrote to a friend in 1832. Repeated disappointments in love had darkened his spirit. The death of his father had forced him back to the old farm to support his mother and sisters. Black care sat very close behind him. Discouraged, lonely, with ambitions ungratified and great powers of which he was but half aware, he paused, like some knight who had lost his way in an enchanted forest. Then blew the clear unmistakable trumpet call which broke the spell and summoned him to action. Although an anti-slavery man by native instinct, Whittier had never given his adherence to the sect of Abolitionists. Now came a letter from Garrison (March 22, 1833): “My brother, there are upwards of two million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of history. There are one hundred thousand of their offspring kidnapped annually from their birth. The southern portion of our country is going down to destruction, physically and morally, with a swift descent, carrying other portions with her. This, then, is a time for the philanthropist—any friend of his country, to put forth his energies, in order to let the oppressed go free, and sustain the republic. The cause is worthy of Gabriel—yea, the God of hosts places himself at its head. Whittier, enlist! Your talents, zeal, influence—all are needed.”[1] The spirit of Burns, years before, had whispered to the boy that he, too, had the poet-soul, yet facile versifying was all that had seemed to come of it, and the young man had turned to politics. Now the living voice of Garrison called him away from partisan ambitions to enlist in a doubtful and perilous measure of moral reform. He obeyed, and—so strange are the mysteries of personality—found in that new service to humanity not only the inspiration which made him a genuine poet, but the popular recognition which set the seal upon his fame.