The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead
is veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days,"
"Snow-Bound," "Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the Bees." It was a
chance copy of Burns that revealed to the farmer lad his own
desire and capacity for verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his
sister sent his "Exile's Departure" to William Lloyd Garrison,
then twenty, and the editor of the "Newburyport Free Press." The
neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was rewarded with a
term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid his way, in old
Essex County fashion, by making shoes.
He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to
enter college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at
rhyming," and much facility in prose. He turned to journalism and
politics, for which he possessed a notable instinct. For a while
he thought he had "done with poetry and literature." Then in
1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's stirring letter bidding him
enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He obeyed the call, not
knowing that this new allegiance to the service of humanity was
to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a national
poet.
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