In referring to this _alma mater_ in after years, under the spell of his muse, the poet thus writes:―― “Still sits the school house by the road, A ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow And black-berry vines are running. Within, the master’s desk is seen, Deep-scarred by raps official; The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife carved initial.” It was natural for Whittier to become the poet of that combination of which Garrison was the apostle, and Phillips and Sumner the orators. His early poems were published by Garrison in his paper, “The Free Press,” the first one when Whittier was nineteen years of age and Garrison himself little more than a boy. The farmer lad was elated when he found the verses which he had so timidly submitted in print with a friendly comment from the editor and a request for more. Garrison even visited Whittier’s parents and urged the importance of giving him a finished education. Thus he fell early under the spell of the great abolitionist and threw himself with all the ardor of his nature into the movement. His poems against slavery and disunion have a ringing zeal worthy of a Cromwell. “They are,” declares one writer, “like the sound of the trumpets blown before the walls of Jericho.” As a Quaker Whittier could not have been otherwise than an abolitionist, for that denomination had long since abolished slavery within its own communion. Most prominent among his poems of freedom are “The Voice of Freedom,” published in 1849, “The Panorama and Other Poems,” in 1856, “In War Times,” in 1863, and “Ichabod,” a pathetically kind yet severely stinging rebuke to Daniel Webster for his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. Webster was right from the standpoint of law and the Constitution, but Whittier argued from the standpoint of human right and liberty. “Barbara Frietchie,”――while it is pronounced purely a fiction, as is also his poem about John Brown kissing the Negro baby on his way to the gallows,――is perhaps the most widely quoted of his famous war poems.