Surely there could not be a pleasanter or more homelike picture than that which the poet has given us of the family on the night of the great storm when the old house was snowbound: 

  “Shut in from all the world without,
   We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
   Content to let the north wind roar
   In baffled rage at pane and door,
   While the red logs before us beat
   The frost-line back with tropic heat. 
   And ever when a louder blast
   Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
   The merrier up its roaring draught
   The great throat of the chimney laughed. 
   The house-dog on his paws outspread,
   Laid to the fire his drowsy head;
   The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
   A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall,
   And for the winter fireside meet
   Between the andiron’s straddling feet
   The mug of cider simmered slow,
   The apples sputtered in a row,
   And close at hand the basket stood
   With nuts from brown October’s wood.”

For a picture of the poet himself we must turn to the verses in “The
Barefoot Boy,” in which he says: 

  “O for boyhood’s time of June,
   Crowding years in one brief moon,
   When all things I heard or saw,
   Me, their master, waited for. 
   I was rich in flowers and trees,
   Humming-birds and honey-bees;
   For my sport the squirrel played,
   Plied the snouted mole his spade;
   For my taste the blackberry cone
   Purpled over hedge and stone;
   Laughed the brook for my delight
   Through the day and through the night,
   Whispering at the garden-wall,
   Talked with me from fall to fall;
   Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
   Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
   Mine on bending orchard trees,
   Apples of Hesperides! 
   Still as my horizon grew,
   Larger grew my riches, too;
   All the world I saw or knew
   Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
   Fashioned for a barefoot boy!"[1]

[Illustration:  THE OLD SCHOOL-HOUSE, HAVERHILL, MASS.]

I doubt if any boy ever rose to intellectual eminence who had fewer opportunities for education than Whittier.  He had no such pasturage to browse on as is open to every reader who, by simply reaching them out, can lay his hands on the treasures of English literature.  He had to borrow books wherever they could be found among the neighbors who were willing to lend, and he thought nothing of walking several miles for one volume.  The only instruction he received was at the district school, which was open a few weeks in midwinter, and at the Haverhill Academy, which he attended two terms of six months each, paying tuition by work in spare hours, and by keeping a small school himself.  A feeble spirit would have languished under such disadvantages.  But Whittier scarcely refers to them, and instead of begging for pity, he takes them as part of the common lot, and seems to remember only what was beautiful and good in his early life.