T. W. Higginson: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1902.
I
HIS LIFE
The Longfellows are descendants of William Longfellow of Horsforth in Yorkshire, who came to New England ‘about 1676,’ settled in Newbury, and married Anne Sewall, a sister of Samuel Sewall, the first chief-justice of Massachusetts. ‘Well educated but a little wild’ is one of several illuminating phrases used to describe this young Yorkshireman. He joined the expedition against Quebec under Sir William Phipps (1690) and perished in a wreck on the coast of Anticosti. One of his sons, Stephen, a blacksmith, had a son who was graduated at Harvard, became a schoolmaster in Falmouth (Portland), and held important offices in the town government. His son, the third Stephen, grandfather of the poet, was judge of the court of common pleas, and representative of his town in the legislature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, in the District of Maine, on February 27, 1807. He was the second son of Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer, conspicuous in political life, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and afterwards, when Maine acquired statehood, a representative for his state in Congress. The mother of the poet, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was a daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, whose adventures during the Revolution bordered on the romantic. Through the Wadsworths the poet was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens.
At the age of thirteen Longfellow printed in the Portland ‘Gazette’ his boyish rhymes on ‘The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.’ He studied at private schools and at the Portland Academy, entered Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in the Sophomore year, and was graduated in 1825, the fourth in a class of thirty-eight. That he stood so high seemed to him ‘rather a mystery.’ Before leaving college he had begun contributing to the ‘United States Literary Gazette,’ a new bi-monthly, published in Boston and edited by Theophilus Parsons. In one year seventeen of his poems appeared in the ‘Gazette,’ for which payment was made at the rate of two dollars a column. Five of these early poems were reprinted in Voices of the Night.
At the Commencement of 1825 the trustees of Bowdoin had determined to establish a professorship of modern languages. The chair was promised Longfellow when he should have fitted himself for it by study abroad. He sailed from New York in May, 1826, provided by George Ticknor with letters of introduction to Irving, Eichhorn, and Southey. He travelled in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, mastered the Romance languages, planned certain prose volumes, and announced to his sister Elizabeth that his poetic career was finished. In August, 1829, he was back in America.
His appointment being confirmed and the stipend fixed at eight hundred dollars (together with another hundred for services as college librarian), Longfellow entered on his duties. During the next five and a half years he corrected bad French and Italian exercises, heard worse viva voce translations, in brief, was a pedagogue in all homely and trying senses of the word. With any one save a born drill-master the class-room soon loses novelty. In spite of the knowledge that he was useful in a chosen field of work, more than happy in his home-life (he had married, in 1831, Miss Mary Storer Potter of Portland), Longfellow felt the narrowness of his surroundings. Bowdoin was a little college and Brunswick a village. The young professor was ambitious. In his own phrase, he wanted a stage on which he could ‘take longer strides and speak to a larger audience.’ At one time he thought of buying the Round Hill School, and visited Northampton to look over the ground. Fortune had something better in store for him. Ticknor was about to resign the chair of modern languages at Harvard, and proposed as his successor Longfellow, whose translation of the Coplas of Manrique (1833) had attracted his notice. The position was formally offered and accepted; it was understood that Longfellow was to spend a year and a half in Europe before taking up his work.
Accompanied by his young wife, Longfellow crossed the ocean in April, 1835, and passed the summer in Stockholm and Copenhagen, studying the Scandinavian languages. In the autumn he was in Holland. Mrs. Longfellow died the last of November. Longfellow went to Heidelberg for the winter, and to Switzerland and the Tyrol for the spring and summer, and in December (1836) was at Cambridge preparing his college lectures.
He lodged at the famous colonial mansion in Brattle Street known as Craigie House, in a room that had once been Washington’s. When Longfellow first applied, old Mrs. Craigie, deceived by his youthful appearance, told him that she had ‘resolved to take no more students into the house.’ Craigie House passed into the possession of Worcester, the lexicographer. Worcester sold it to Nathan Appleton, whose daughter Longfellow married in 1843. It then became the property of Mrs. Longfellow.
At Harvard the exactions of work were not like those in the smaller college, strictly pedagogical. Longfellow had time for literature and for society. The years were richly productive, as the following bibliographical lists show.