f the little old country school-house as it used to be, the
only _alma mater_ of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many
others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities
look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of
knowledge.

"Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.

"Within the master's desk is seen,
Deep-scarred by raps official,
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knife's carved initial."

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he
began to contribute verses to Garrison's _Free Press_, published in
Newburyport, and to the _Haverhill Gazette_. Then he went to Boston,
and became editor for a short time of the _Manufacturer_. Next he
edited the _Essex Gazette_, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of
George D. Prentice's paper, the _New England Weekly Review_, at
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much
promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_, whose
"Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. At Hartford, too, he published his
first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled _Legends of New
England_, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his
early interest in Indian colonial traditions--especially those which
had a touch of the supernatural--a mine which he afterward worked to
good purpose in the _Bridal of Pennacook_, the _Witch's Daughter_, and
similar poems. Some of the _Legends_ testify to Brainard's influence
and to the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford.
One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous "Moodus
Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is
the same in subject with Brainard's _Black Fox of Salmon River_. After
a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to
farming.

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into this he threw
himself with all the ardor of his nature. He became the poet of the
reform as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and Phillips its
speakers. In 1833 he published _Justice and Expediency_, a prose tract
against slavery, and in the same year he took part in the formation of
the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the
convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier was a
Q