BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The house is still standing in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, where John Greenleaf Whittier was born, December 17, 1807. It was built near the close of the seventeenth century by an ancestor of the poet, it sheltered several generations of Whittiers, in it John Greenleaf Whittier lived till his thirtieth year, and now it is likely to enjoy a long lease of life in association with his name, for since his death it has come into the possession of the Whittier Club of Haverhill, and its chief room has been restored to the condition in which it was when the boy was living in it the recollection of whose experience inspired that idyl of New England life, “Snow-Bound.”
It is to “Snow-Bound” that one resorts for the most natural and delightful narrative of the associations amongst which Whittier passed his boyhood. His family held to the tenets of the Friends, and the discipline of that society in connection with the somewhat rigorous exactions of country life in New England in the early part of the century determined the character of the formal education which he received. In later life he was wont to refer to the journals of Friends which he found in the scanty library in his father’s house as forming a large part of his reading in boyhood. He steeped his mind with their thoughts and learned to love their authors for their unconscious saintliness. There were not more than thirty volumes on the shelves, and, with a passion for reading, he read them over and over. One of these books, however, was the Bible, and he possessed himself of its contents, not only becoming familiar with the text, but penetrated by the spirit. When he began to write, his practice pieces were very largely paraphrases of scriptural themes, and throughout his poetry allusions to Biblical characters and passages fall as naturally from his lips as allusions to Greek or Roman literature and history from the lips of Milton.
Of regular schooling he had what the neighborhood could give, a few weeks each winter in the district school, and when he was nineteen, a little more than a year in an academy just started in Haverhill. In “Snow-Bound” he has drawn the portrait of one of his teachers at the district school, and his poem “To My Old Schoolmaster” commemorates another, Joshua Coffin, with whom he preserved a strong friendship in his manhood, when they were engaged in the same great cause of the abolition of human slavery. These teachers, who, according to the old New England custom, lived in turn with the families of their pupils, brought into the Whittier household other reading than strictly religious books, and Coffin especially rendered the boy a great service in introducing him to a knowledge of Burns, whose poems he read aloud once as the family sat by the fireside in the evening. The boy of fourteen was entranced; it was the voice of poetry speaking directly to the ear of poetry, and the new-comer recognized in an instant the prophet whose mantle he was to wear. Coffin was struck with the effect on his listener, and left the book with him. In one of his best known poems, written a generation later, when receiving a sprig of heather in bloom, Whittier records his indebtedness to Burns. To use his own expression, “the older poet woke the younger.” He had been dreaming of Indians, much as a young Scotsman might have pleased his imagination by picturing border chieftains. He said himself, looking back with amusement to his poem of “Mogg Megone,” “it suggests the idea of a big Indian in his war paint strutting about in Sir Walter Scott’s plaid.” But except for one or two intentional imitations, Burns’ influence over Whittier was summed up in that sudden illumination which showed him, not indeed the beauty of nature and the worth of man,—the knowledge of these was a birthright,—but what poetry could do in transfiguring both.
The home life which the boy led, aside from the conscious or unconscious schooling
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