362 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



buryport "Free Press," then edited by William Lloyd Garrison. 

 From 1827 to 1892 no year passed without verses which sooner 

 or later came to publication. In 1826, before he was nineteen 

 years old, he was visited while at work in the corn-field by 

 Garrison, the young editor, who had been struck by the merit 

 of his verses. The friendship thus begun proved lifelong. Had 

 anything been needed to enhance the reformatory instincts of a 

 Yankee Quaker, this first literary recognition, chancing to come 

 from the man destined to be the most strenuous reformer of his 

 time, would have been enough. 



In his twentieth year, Whittier went to the Academy in 

 Haverhill, where he spent two terms, and particularly distin- 

 guished himself in English composition. During a winter vaca- 

 tion he taught a country school. At twenty-one he was already 

 a professional writer for some of the smaller newspapers. At 

 twenty -three he was editor of the " Haverhill Gazette " ; and 

 before he was twenty-four he was made editor of the "New 

 England Weekly Eeview," a paper published at Hartford, Conn. 

 At the end of a year and a half, he resigned this office, on the 

 ground of ill-health, and returned to Massachusetts. Meanwhile 

 he had published a small volume of "New England Legends." 



At this time, Garrison had just established " The Liberator " 

 in Boston. The movement for the abolition of slavery was 

 fairly begun. Into this movement Whittier threw himself with 

 all his might. For thirty years he constantly advocated it in 

 both prose and verse. He was a member of the Antislavery 

 Convention at Philadelphia, in 1833.* He was attacked by a 

 mob at Haverhill, in 1834; and by a worse one at Concord, New 

 Hampshire, in 1835. In this year he was for one term a member 

 of the General Court. In 1837 he went to New York, as a secre- 

 tary of the National A ntislavery Society. Early in 1838 he was 

 made editor of the " Penny slvania Freeman," a journal devoted 

 to the cause of abolition, published at Philadelphia. In May, 

 1838, the office of this paper, together with Pennsylvania Hall, 

 just erected for the purpose of providing the Abolitionists with 

 a regular place of meeting, was burned by a mob. In 1840 he 

 resigned his charge of the "Freeman," and rejoined his mother 

 and sister, who had moved to Amesbury, Massachusetts. Here, 

 henceforth, was his legal residence. 



* See his vivid reminiscences of it, Prose Works, Vol. III. p. 171. 



