It pleased me much to have something to do which required
the use of pen and ink, and I think there must be a good many
scraps of verse buried among the blank pages of those old
account-books of that found their way there during the frequent
half-hours of waiting for the cloth to be brought in from the
mills.
The only machinery in the room was a hydraulic arrangement for
pressing the cloth into bales, managed by two or three men, one
of whom was quite a poet, and a fine singer also. His hymns were
frequently in request, on public occasions. He lent me the first
volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It was a small book,
containing mostly Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one
of them, fully to appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary
to have been a workink-girl in slave-labor times. New England
Womanhood crowned Whittier as her laureate from the day of his
heroine's spirited response to the slaveholder:--
"0, could ye have seen her--that pride of our girls--
Arise and cast back the dark wealth of her curls,
With a scorn in her eye that the gazer could feel,
And a glance like the sunshine that flashes on steel!
Go back, haughty Southron! Go back! for thy gold
Is red with the blood of the hearts thou hast sold!"
There was in this volume another poem which is not in any of the
later editions, the impression of which, as it remains to me in
broken snatches, is very beautiful.
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