Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807- ).  He was born in a solitary farm-house near Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his life has been passed mostly at his native place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury.  The local color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of hill-side farms, opening out below into wide marshes—­“the low, green prairies of the sea,” and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury.  The scenery of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier:  the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water meadow between which glide the broad-sailed “gundalows”—­a local corruption of gondola—­laden with hay.  Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such education as the district school could supply, supplemented by two years at the Haverhill Academy.  In his School Days he gives a picture of the little old country school-house as it used to be, the only alma mater of so many distinguished Americans, and to which many others who have afterward trodden the pavements of great universities look back so fondly as to their first wicket gate into the land of knowledge.

  “Still sits the school-house by the road,
    A ragged beggar sunning;
  Around it still the sumachs grow
    And blackberry vines are running.

  “Within the master’s desk is seen,
    Deep-scarred by raps official,
  The warping floor, the battered seats,
    The jack-knife’s carved initial.”

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the young poet, and he began to contribute verses to Garrison’s Free Press, published in Newburyport, and to the Haverhill Gazette.  Then he went to Boston, and became editor for a short time of the Manufacturer.  Next he edited the Essex Gazette, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of George D. Prentice’s paper, the New England Weekly Review, at Hartford, Conn.  Here he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the Connecticut Mirror, whose “Remains” Whittier edited in 1832.  At Hartford, too, he published his first book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled Legends of New England, 1831, which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his early interest in Indian colonial traditions—­especially those which had a touch of the supernatural—­a mine which he afterward worked to good purpose in the Bridal of Pennacook, the Witch’s Daughter, and similar poems.  Some of the Legends testify to Brainard’s influence and to the influence of Whittier’s temporary residence at Hartford.  One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous “Moodus Noises” at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard’s Black Fox of Salmon River.  After a year and a half at Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to farming.