Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

Not one of this eminent circle had the keys of common life so absolutely in his hands as Whittier. Had anything been wanting in this respect, his interest in politics would have 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 organized labor. 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. The more exclusive 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 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.

John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haverhill, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1807. His earliest American ancestor, Thomas Whittier, was of