s letter has only
lately come into my possession, and is now first quoted:--

"Disappointment in a thousand ways has gone over my heart,
and left it dust. Yet I still look forward with high
anticipations. I have placed the goal of my ambitions
high--but with the blessing of God it shall be reached. The
world has at last breathed into my bosom a portion of its
own bitterness, and I now feel as if I would wrestle
manfully in the strife of men. If my life is spared, the
world shall know me in a loftier capacity than _as a writer
of rhymes_. [The italics are his own.] There--is not that
boasting?--But I have said it with a strong pulse and a
swelling heart, and I shall strive to realize it."

In another letter, written at about the same time to the same
correspondent, he says: "As for tears, I have not shed anything of the
kind since my last flogging under the birchen despotism of the Nadir
Shah of our village school. I have sometimes wished I _could_ shed
tears--especially when angry with myself or with the world. There is an
iron fixedness about my heart on such occasions which I would gladly
melt away."

From the birthplace to the Amesbury home is a distance of nine miles,
traversed by electric cars in less than an hour. Midway is the thriving
village of Merrimac, formerly known as West Amesbury. It was at Birchy
Meadow in this vicinity that Whittier taught his first and only term of
district school, in the winter of 1827-28. The road is at considerable
distance from the Merrimac River, and at several points it surmounts
hills which afford remarkably fine views of the wide and fertile river
valley, with occasional glimpses of the river itself. At Pond Hills,
near the village of Amesbury, the landscape presented to view is one of
the widest and loveliest in all this region. It is a panorama of the
beautifully rounded hills peculiar to this section, with a tidal river
winding among them with many a graceful curve. The electric road we
have taken is about two miles from the left bank of the river, across
which we look to the Newbury hills, cultivated to their tops, with here
and there a church spire indicating the location of the distant
villages. Every part of this lovely valley has been commemorated in
Whittier's writings, prose and verse.

[Illustration: THE SYCAMORES]

If, instead of the trolley, we take the carriage road from Haverhill
along the bank of the