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

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[149] Garrison urged the elder Whittier to give his son better schooling, but poverty stood in the way. A chance came a little later to take a few terms in a newly established “academy” at Haverhill; and that was all the formal education Whittier ever had. “I have renounced college,” he wrote in 1828, “for the good reason that I have no disposition to humble myself to meanness for an education — crowding myself through college at the expense of others, and leaving it with a debt or an obligation to weigh down my spirit like an incubus, and paralyze every exertion. The professions are already crowded full to overflowing; and I, forsooth, because I have a miserable knack of rhyming, must swell the already enormous number, struggle awhile with debt and difficulties, and then, weary of life, go down to my original insignificance, where the tinsel of classical honors will but aggravate my misfortune.” He was not, however, to return to farm life. Through Garrison he was offered the editorship of a weekly temperance paper called the Philanthropist, in Boston. In the letter from which we have just quoted, he said of this possibility: “Seriously-the ”