The warriors that fought for their country, and bled,
Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed;
No stone tells the place where their ashes repose,
Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes.
They died in their glory, surrounded by fame,
And Victory’s loud trump their death did proclaim;
They are dead; but they live in each Patriot’s breast,
And their names are engraven on honor’s bright crest.
These verses cannot be assigned to the domain of high art, most certainly, but they mark in this 17 case the beginning of a career, and milestones are always interesting. It was Longfellow’s first poem, and he chose an American subject. We know from him the circumstances of the reception of this youthful effort. When the morning paper arrived it was unfolded and read by his father, and no notice was taken of the effusion; but when, in the evening, the boy went with his father to the house of Judge Mellen, his father’s friend, whose son Frederic was his own playmate, the talk turned upon poetry. The host took up the morning’s “Gazette.” “Did you see the piece in to-day’s paper? Very stiff. Remarkably stiff; moreover, it is all borrowed, every word of it.” No defence was offered. It is recorded that there were tears on the young boy’s pillow that night.
The young Henry Longfellow went to various schools, as those of Mrs. Fellows and Mr. Carter, and the Portland Academy, then kept by Mr. Bezaleel Cushman, a Dartmouth College graduate. In 1821, he passed the entrance examinations of Bowdoin College, of which his father was a trustee. The college itself was but twenty years old, and Maine had only just become an independent State of the Union, so that there was a strong feeling of local pride in this young institution. Henry Longfellow’s brother, Stephen, two years older than himself, passed the examinations 18 with him, but perhaps it was on account of the younger brother’s youth—he being only fourteen—that the boys remained a year longer at home, and did not go to Brunswick until the beginning of the Sophomore year. Henry’s college life was studious and modest. He and Nathaniel Hawthorne were classmates, having been friends rather than intimates, and Hawthorne gives in his “Fanshawe” a tolerably graphic picture of the little rural college. Neither of the two youths cared much for field sports, but both of them were greatly given to miscellaneous reading; and both of them also spent a good deal of time in the woods of Brunswick, which were, and still are, beautiful. Longfellow pursued the appointed studies, read poetry, was fond of Irving, and also of books about the Indians, an experience which in later life yielded him advantage.