The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant appreciation from the literary critics of his country. John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow up to be the Burns of New England; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices. Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. You remember the sneer of the Tory critic--“Back to your gallipots, Mr. Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated. But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his head in Philadelphia.