Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a
region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes--"the
low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches of Hampton and
Salisbury. The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of
Whittier: the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their
factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back
country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow
between which glide the broad-sailed "gundalows"--a local corruption of
gondola--laden with hay. Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such
education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two
years at the Haverhill Academy. In his _School Days_ he gives a
picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the
only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many
others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities
look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of
knowledge.

"Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.

"Within the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official,
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial."

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he
began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in
Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston,