JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 361 



certain lines of conduct are essentially bad, — among -which are 

 the drinking of spirits, the frequenting of taverns, indulgence in 

 gaming, the use of oaths, and the enslavement of any human 

 being. 



In this firm faith, fortified from Scripture, that everybody 

 really knows right from wrong, that many common lines of con- 

 duct are indubitably wrong, and that whoever follow such lines 

 of conduct do so from wilful neglect of the inner light and 

 the still small voice divinely vouchsafed them, Whittier was 

 trained and lived. To this faith, involving the essential equal- 

 ity of all mankind, and the deliberate ungodliness of whoever 

 by word or deed fails to recognize this equality, may be traced, 

 I think, many of the peculiar characteristics that make him, 

 even to those who mistrust the reforms in which he so passion- 

 ately engaged himself, perhaps the least irritating of reformers. 

 And not only was he trained from infancy in this faith, of which 

 reform is the only logical expression in action; but his life from 

 beginning to end was singularly remote from that heart-breaking 

 experience of actual fact, in crowded and growing communities, 

 which goes so far nowadays to disprove, for whoever will frankly 

 recognize what is before him, the essential vitality of those parts 

 of human nature which are best. 



A barefoot boy to look at, an unswerving believer at heart in 

 the inner light of the Friends, and by nature one of those 

 calmly passionate Yankees who cannot help taking life in ear- 

 nest, he grew up in days when the New England country was 

 still pure in the possession of an unmixed race whose power of 

 self-government has never been surpassed. His " Snow-Bound " 

 relates his own memories of childhood; some of the sketches 

 preserved in his prose works,* add pleasant touches to the better 

 known pictures in his verses. He always had a hankering for 

 literature. A strolling Scotch vagrant, hospitably treated to 

 cheese and cider, sang him in payment some songs of Burns. At 

 fourteen, he laid hands on a copy of Burns's Poems. These 

 seem to have started him at writing. At seventeen he had writ- 

 ten a poem on the "Exile's Departure" from the "shores of 

 Hibernia," f which, in 1826, found its way into print in the New- 



* Notably, " Yankee Gypsies," and " Magicians and Witch Folk." Prose 

 Works, Vol. I. pp. 326, 399. 



t Poetical Works, Vol. IV. p. 333. 



