The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar and troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the ambition was soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland to the hills and folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed to the Quaker lad, and one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little book, _Whittier-Land_, verses and fragments of letters which show how deeply that poison of the age had bitten into his heart. But the influence of those sons of fire was more than counteracted by the gentle spirit of Mrs. Hemans--indeed, the worst to be said of Whittier is that never, to the day of his death, did he quite throw off allegiance to the facile and innocent muse of that lady. It is only right to add that in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war, he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is commonly supposed to have been. Such was the boy, then--thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that--who was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To one of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England literature. Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at the best, although in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it could offer no spiritual seduction to one who held liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends. But to the other influence he fell a natural prey. The whole tradition of the Quakers--the memory of Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John Woolman, whose Journal he was to edit--prepared him to take part in the great battle of the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met Garrison face to face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform and politics. I am not, of course, criticising that movement or its achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy arena. As he says in lines that are true if not elegant: Hater of din and riot, He lived in days unquiet; And, lover of all beauty, Trod the hard ways of duty.