Whittier
represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but
equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker
farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in
1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his
great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the
Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than this by two
generations. The house has been restored to the precise aspect it
had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook, even
the door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are
witnesses to the fidelity of the descriptions in "Snow-Bound."
The neighborhood is still a lonely one. The youth grew up in
seclusion, yet in contact with a few great ideas, chief among
them Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an old-fashioned
Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of
Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The
taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and
priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with
humanitarian passion.
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