What more can we do to show his early home than to quote from his own beautiful poem, “Snow-bound”?  There the house is pictured for us, inside and out, with all its furnishings; and those who gather around its hearth, inmates and visitors, are set before us so clearly that long after the book has been put away they remain as distinct in the memory as portraits that are visible day after day on the walls of our own homes.  He reproduces in his verse the landscapes he saw, the legends of witches and Indians he listened to, the schoolfellows he played with, the voices of the woods and fields, and the round of toil and pleasure in a country boy’s life; and in other poems his later life, with its impassioned devotion to freedom and lofty faith, is reflected as lucidly as his youth is in “Snow-bound” and “The Barefoot Boy.”

He himself was “The Barefoot Boy,” and what Robert Burns said of himself Whittier might repeat:  “The poetic genius of my country found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the plow, and threw her inspiring mantle over me.”  He was a farmer’s son, born at a time when farm-life in New England was more frugal than it is now, and with no other heritage than the good name and example of parents and kinsmen, in whom simple virtues—­thrift, industry, and piety—­abounded.

His birthplace still stands near Haverhill, Mass.,—­a house in one of the hollows of the surrounding hills, little altered from what it was in 1807, the year he was born, when it was already at least a century and a half old.

[Illustration:  WHITTIER’S BIRTHPLACE, NEAR HAVERHILL, MASS.]

He had no such opportunities for culture as Holmes and Lowell had in their youth.  His parents were intelligent and upright people of limited means, who lived in all the simplicity of the Quaker faith, and there was nothing in his early surroundings to encourage and develop a literary taste.  Books were scarce, and the twenty volumes on his father’s shelves were, with one exception, about Quaker doctrines and Quaker heroes.  The exception was a novel, and that was hidden away from the children, for fiction was forbidden fruit.  No library or scholarly companionship was within reach; and if his gift had been less than genius, it could never have triumphed over the many disadvantages with which it had to contend.  Instead of a poet he would have been a farmer like his forefathers.  But literature was a spontaneous impulse with him, as natural as the song of a bird; and he was not wholly dependent on training and opportunity, as he would have been had he possessed mere talent.

Frugal from necessity, the life of the Whittiers was not sordid nor cheerless to him, moreover; and he looks back to it as tenderly as if it had been full of luxuries.  It was sweetened by strong affections, simple tastes, and an unflinching sense of duty; and in all the members of the household the love of nature was so genuine that meadow, wood, and river yielded them all the pleasure they needed, and they scarcely missed the refinements of art.