In 1833 he
joined the abolitionists. This step had very nearly the same effect on his
fortunes as the public declaration of an adherence to the doctrines of
anarchy would to-day have on a man similarly situated. "The best magazines
at the North would not open their pages to him. He was even mobbed, and the
office of an anti-slavery paper, which he was editing in Philadelphia, was
sacked. He wrote many poems to aid the abolition cause. These were really
editorials expressed in verse, which caught the attention in a way denied
to prose. For more than thirty years such verse constituted the most of his
poetical production. Lowell noticed that the Quaker doctrine of peace did
not deter Whittier from his vigorous attack on slavery. In A Fable for
Critics (1848), Lowell asks:--
"... O leather-clad Fox?
Can that be thy son, in the battlers mid din,
Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in
To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin,
With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring
Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?"
Whittier did, however, try to keep the spirit of brotherly love warm
throughout his life.
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