At the age of fourteen he was prepared for Bowdoin College, which he entered a year later as a sophomore, and became a member of one of the most distinguished classes in American history. Among his fellow-students were Nathaniel Hawthorne, his personal friend, John S. C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, William Pitt Fessenden, John P. Hale, Calvin E. Stone, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. He was graduated the fourth in his class.
The ambition for authorship came to him among the shades of Bowdoin. He said while there, thus anticipating in prose the "Psalm of Life:" "Whatever I study I ought to engage in with all my soul, for I will be eminent in something."
His poems published in the newspapers, principally in the Boston Literary Gazette, during his college life made for him a name, and he was offered the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College, soon after his graduation. To better prepare himself for the chair he went abroad, in 1826, in his twentieth year. He studied in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He made himself master of the French, Spanish, German, and Italian languages and literature, and returned to America in the late summer of 1829, and entered upon the duties of his professorship at Bowdoin in the autumn. He married Miss Mary Potter, of Portland, Me., and went to live in an old house, which was shaded by a single great elm, the site of which is still shown, on a salary of $1,000 per year. He published "Outre Mer," and taught and wrote with such distinguished success that, on the resignation of George Ticknor, he was offered the chair of modern languages at Harvard. For the larger preparation which he found necessary for his work, he went to Europe again in 1835. In his first visit to Europe he had met Washington Irving in Spain; he now made the acquaintance of Carlyle and Browning. His wife died in Germany.
He became a professor in Harvard in the fall of 1836, making his residence at the Cragie House, an old colonial mansion, shaded by trees, which Washington had used for his headquarters in 1775-1776. He married a most beautiful and accomplished lady, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, of Boston, whom he had met abroad, and who is supposed to be described in his romance "Hyperion." Here, happy in his domestic life, surrounded by the most scholarly men of America, his literary life ripened, his fame as a poet grew, and his sympathy with life as expressed in his works won all hearts. His "Voices of the Night" made him the poet of the home; "Evangeline," which is the American book of Ruth, made him the singer of the fidelity of holy affections, and "Hiawatha," the voice of the dying traditions of the Indian race.
He was a lover of his family, and a great affliction came to him in the summer of 1861. One July day his wife was playing with some sealing-wax with her children, when her dress caught fire, and she was enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. The poet is said to have suddenly changed from a young man to an old man under his weight of grief; he appeared in the streets of Cambridge again, in a few weeks, but unlike his former self. His affection for his dead wife in his widowerhood is expressed in the "Cross of Snow," written many years after her death:
"In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died."
He would take a dear friend into the room where her portrait hung, point to it, and say "my dear wife," and turn away to weep. His loving dream of his first wife is pictured in "The Footsteps of Angels:"
"And with them the Being Beauteous,
Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
And is now a saint in heaven.
"With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.
"And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes.
Like the stars, so still and saint-like.
Looking downward from the skies.