The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher, and in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature over the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned out so much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East Haverhill, in the old homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden among the hills from any other human habitation. It is a country not without quiet charm, though the familiar lines of _Snow-Bound_ make us think of it first as beaten by storm and locked in by frost. And, notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate home, life on the farm was unnecessarily hard. The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who used to drive regularly to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect themselves from the bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all his life from the rigour of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency of mental training. Not only was the family poor, but it even appears that the sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited means of education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was the boy allowed to attend the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher--he seems to have shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few--he has told us how few--books in the house, and little time for reading those he could borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story of his first printed poem in the _Free Press_ of Newburyport and of the encouragement given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd Garrison, is one of the best known and most picturesque incidents in American letters. The young poet--he was then nineteen--was launched; from that time he became an assiduous writer for the press, and was at intervals editor of various country or propagandist newspapers.