In the War of 1812, when the little Longfellow lad was only five, a company of American soldiers was stationed in the fort at Portland to defend the town against attacks from British warships. Young as Henry was, he understood what all the excitement meant. When he was in his seventh year, he heard the booming of the cannon in the great sea battle between the American brig Enterprise and the British schooner Boxer. Both commanders were killed and buried on one of the hills of Portland. There was a sensation when the Enterprise towed the Boxer into port as a prize of war. In the poem, “My Lost Youth,” nearly fifty years after the battle, Longfellow wrote:
“I remember the sea-fight far away
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay
Where they in battle died.”
Out near Hiram, Maine, where the Wadsworth family lived, there was a little lake known as Lovell’s Pond. On one of his visits to his grandfather’s, young Henry heard the story of a battle which had taken place there during the French and Indian War. When he was thirteen he wrote four stanzas which he named “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.” Signing it “Henry,” he left it at the office of the Portland Gazette, telling only his sister what he had done. A writer has told a story of the way Henry’s first published poem was received:
“In the morning how slowly the father unfolded the damp sheet, and how carefully he dried it at the open fire before he began to read it! And how much foreign news there seemed to be in it!
“At last, Henry and the sister who shared his secret peeped over their parent’s shoulder—and the poem was there! They spent most of the day reading it. In the evening they went to play with a son of Judge Mellen, and while the judge was sitting by the fire in the twilight with the young folk and a few older neighbors around him, he said,
“Did you see the piece in to-day’s paper? Very stiff, remarkably stiff! Moreover, it is all borrowed—every word of it!”
When Henry was fifteen, his father sent him to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, with his older brother, Stephen. Though the father was himself a graduate of Harvard, he was a director of this new college in his own state. Henry was graduated at eighteen and, young though he was, the trustees of the college invited him to come back, a few years later, as their professor of modern languages.