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Updated: June 19, 2025
Once Wendell Phillips concluded an impassioned oration by reciting one of Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of peace, John Greenleaf Whittier."
"Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
There is every presumption, from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant too physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm has embodied in Snow-Bound.
It was Whittier's sad experience to be deprived of the companionship of all those most dear to him, and for over twenty years to live without that intimate household communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. For several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth's death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill.
Whittier's sister Elizabeth was a sensitive woman, whose delicate health was a constant source of anxiety to her brother, especially after the death of their mother, when they were left alone together in the home at Amesbury.
"I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting, "any further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences" the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly.
He was sentenced, among other things, to have his hand branded with the letters S.S., signifying "Slave Stealer." The incident just referred to inspired one of the finest productions of Whittier's pen.
The eastern sun found his way through the hemlocks to wake us in the morning, and the effect was so delightfully different from the rising bell of the boarding-house, that when Sophronia indulged in some freedom with certain of Whittier's lines, and exclaimed: "Sad is the man who never sees The sun shine through his hemlock trees"
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.
The best is not too good for the youngest child. Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course essential. But never was a greater mistake made than in thinking that a youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it. Even children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Longfellow's "Hiawatha."
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