Identifier: sheppsliterarywo00bird (find matches)
Title: Shepp's Literary world: containing the lives of our noted American and favorite English authors. Together with choice selections from their writings
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Birdsall, William Wilfred, 1854-1909 Jones, Rufus Matthew, 1863-1948, joint author
Subjects: English literature American literature
Publisher: Philadelphia, Shepp pub. co
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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ses his charm,and, to scholars, his one defect. It has led him to write, as no other poet could,upon the dear simjilicity of New England farm life. He has written from the heartand not from the head ; he has composed popular pastorals, not hymns of culture.Only such training as the district schools afforded, with a couple of yeaiS at Haver-hill Academy comprised his advantages in education. In referring to this alma mater in after years, under the spell of his muse, thepoet thus writes :— Still sits the school house by the road,A ragged beggar sunning;Around it still the sumachs growAnd black-berry yines are running. Within, the masters desk is seen,Deep-scarred by raps official;The warping floor, the battered seats,The jack-knife carved initial. It was natural for Whittier to become the poet of that combination of whichGarrison was the apostle, and Phillips and Sumner the orators. His early poems werepublished by Garrison in his paper, The Free Press, the first one when Whittier 80
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JOHN G. WHITTIER, HIS HOME AND BIRTHPLACE. JOHN GREEJSTLEAF WHITTIEE. 81 was nineteen years of age and Garrison himself little more than a boy. The farmerlad was elated when he found the verses which he had so timidly submitted in printwith a friendly comment from the editor and a request for more. Garrison evenvisited Whittiers parents and urged the importance of giving him a finished educa-tion. Thus he fell early under the spell of the great abolitionist and threw himselfwith all the ardor of his nature into the movement. His poems against slavery anddisunion have a ringing zeal worthy of a Cromwell. They are, declares onewriter, like the sound of the trumpets blown before the walls of Jericho. As a Quaker Whittier could not have been otherwise than an abolitionist, for thatdenomination had long since abolished slavery within its own communion. Mostprominent among his j)oems of freedom are The Voice of Freedom, published in1849, The Panorama and Other Poems, in 1856, In War Times,

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