To the world of literature they are perhaps less important
than those of most men who have achieved a high place.
Whittier was between twenty and thirty years of age when his family
left the little farm near Haverhill, where he was born, and moved into
the town of Amesbury, eight miles distant. Long before that period he
had identified himself with the antislavery cause, and had visited, in
the course of his ceaseless labors for the slaves, New York,
Philadelphia, and Washington. These brief journeys bounded his travels
in this world.
In the year 1843 he wrote anxiously to his publisher, Mr. Fields, "I
send with this 'The Exiles,' a kind of John Gilpin legend. I am in
doubt about it. Read it, and decide for thyself whether it is worth
printing."
He began at this rather late period (he was then thirty-six years old)
to feel a touch of satisfaction in his comparatively new occupation of
writing poetry, and to speak of it without reserve to his chosen
friends. His poems were then beginning to bring him into personal
relation with the reading world. Many years later, when speaking of
the newspaper writing which absorbed his earlier life, he said that he
had written a vast amount for the press; he thought that his work
would fill nearly ten octavo volumes; but he had grown utterly weary
of throwing so much out into space from which no response ever came
back to him. At length he decided to put it all aside, discovering
that a power lay in him for more congenial labors.
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