Excerpt from Snow-Bound Among the Hills, Songs of Labor; And Other Poems

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 newcomer 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, on receiving a sprig of heather in bloom, Whittier records his indebtedness to Burns. To use his own expression, "the older poet woke the younger."

The home life which the boy led, aside from the conscious or unconscious schooling which he found in books, was one of many hardships, but within the sanctuary of a gracious and dignified home. The secluded valley in which he lived was three miles from the nearest village; from the date of the erection of the homestead till now no neighbor"s roof has been in sight. The outdoor life was that of a farmer with cattle, tempered, indeed, in the short summer by the kindly gifts of nature, so happily shown in the poem "The Barefoot Boy," but for the most part a life of toil and endurance which left its marks indelibly in the shattered constitution of the poet.

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