Her home is brave in Jaffrey Street,All this type of life he had studied in New England history,--none better,--but what real awe did it impose on him who had learned at his mother's knee to seek the wilderness with William Penn or to ride through the howling mobs with Barclay of Ury? The Quaker tradition, after all, had a Brahminism of its own which Beacon Street in Boston could not rear or Harvard College teach. To this special privilege John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haverhill, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1807.
With stately stairways worn
With feet of old Colonial knights
And ladies gentle-born.
And on her, from the wainscot old,
Ancestral faces frown,--
And this has worn the soldier's sword,
And that the judge's gown.
This text is part of:
[3]
filled the gap. First thrilled by the wrongs of the slave, and serving in that cause a long apprenticeship, it was instinctive in him to be the advocate of peace, of woman suffrage, of organised labour.
In such outworks of reform he had an attitude, a training, and a sympathy which his literary friends had not. He was, in the English phrase, “a poet of the people,” and proved by experience that even America supplied such a function.
Not in vain had he studied the essential dignity of the early New England aristocracy, as he traced the lineage of his heroine, Amy Wentworth, and paced with her the streets of Portsmouth, N. H., a region less wholly Puritan than Massachusetts:--
The Macmillan Company. London. 1902.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.