hearth, inmates and visitors, are set before us so clearly that long
after the book has been put away they remain as distinct in the memory
as portraits that are visible day after day on the walls of our own
homes. He reproduces in his verse the landscapes he saw, the legends of
witches and Indians he listened to, the schoolfellows he played with,
the voices of the woods and fields, and the round of toil and pleasure
in a country boy's life; and in other poems his later life, with its
impassioned devotion to freedom and lofty faith, is reflected as lucidly
as his youth is in "Snow-bound" and "The Barefoot Boy."

He himself was "The Barefoot Boy," and what Robert Burns said of himself
Whittier might repeat: "The poetic genius of my country found me, as the
prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the plow, and threw her inspiring
mantle over me." He was a farmer's son, born at a time when farm-life in
New England was more frugal than it is now, and with no other heritage
than the good name and example of parents and kinsmen, in whom simple
virtues--thrift, industry, and piety--abounded.

His birthplace still stands near Haverhill, Mass.,--a house in one of
the hollows of the surrounding hills, little altered from what it was in
1807, the year he was born, when it was already at least a century and a
half old.

[Illustration: WHITTIER'S BIRTHPLACE, NEAR HAVERHILL, MASS.]

He had no such opportunities for culture as Holmes and Lowell had in
their youth. His parents were intelligent and upright people of
limited means, who lived in all the simplicity of the Quaker faith, and
there was nothing in his early surroundings to encourage and develop a
literary taste. Books were scarce, and the twenty volumes on his