the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and bright bits of foreign
lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went abroad, his quiet
life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, and he
followed contemporary European politics with the closest
interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction
and section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker
creed, he held its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning
fashion that his hymns are sung today in all the churches.

When "The Atlantic Monthly" was established in 1857, Whittier was
fifty. He took his place among the contributors to the new
magazine not as a controversialist but as a man of letters, with
such poems as "Tritemius," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride."
Characteristic productions of this period are "My Psalm,"
"Cobbler Keezar's Vision," "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," "The Eternal
Goodness"--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it was not until
the publication of "Snow-Bound" in 1866 that Whittier's work
touched its widest popularity. He had never married, and the
deaths of his mother and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in
the desolate Amesbury house, over memories of his birthplace, six
miles away in East Haverhill. The homestead had gone out of the
hands of the Whittiers, and the poet, nearing sixty, set himself
to compose an idyll descriptive of the vanished past. No artist
could have a theme more perfectly adapted to his mood and to his
powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there
any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old
farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely
charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's
genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a
true New England hearthside.