Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1895 — WHITTIER’S BOYHOOD. [ARTICLE]

WHITTIER’S BOYHOOD.

The Quaker Poet Had but Scant In* atruction in Youth. , In his boyhood Whittier had scant instruction, for the district school was open only a few' Weeks in winter. HF had but few books; there were scarcely thirty in the bouse. The one book he read and read again until he bad it by heart almost was the Bible; and the Bible was always the book which exerted the strongest literary Influence upon him. But when he was 14 a teacher came who lent him books of travel and opened a new world to him. Itwas this teacher who brought to the Whit- . flers one evening a volume of Burns and read aloud some of the poems, after explaining the Scottish dialect. Whit. tier begged to borrow the book, which was almost the first poetry he had ever read. It was this volume of Burns which set Whittier to making verses himself, serving both as the inspiration and the inode! of his earlier poetic efforts. The Scottish poet, with bls homely pictures of a life as bare and as hardy as that of New England then, first revealed to the American poet what poetry really was, and how it migSt be made out of the actual facts of his own life. That book of Burns’ poems had an even stronger influence on Whittier than the old volume of the Spectator which fell Into the hands of Franklin had on the American author whose boyhood Is most like Whittier’s. Franklln also was born in a humble and hardworking family, doing early has share of the labor, and having but a meager education, though always longing for learning. It is true that Irving and Cooper and Bryant did not graduate from college, but they could have done so, had they persevered; and Emerson and Longfellow and Hawthorne did get as much of the higher education as was then possible in America. But neither Franklin noi- Whittier ever had the dhance; it was as much as they could do to pick up the merest elements of an education.—St Nicholas.