deal, quietly investigating the mental characteristics of Mr. Appleton's fair daughter. Thoughts of her were to flit about him in dreaming and in working hours for the next few years; but at this time they parted as ordinary friends. In December, 1836, Longfellow had returned to America, and entered upon his professorship. Harvard is of course the intellectual glory of the States. In 1636 the nucleus of the College was created, and two years later, John Harvard, an English Nonconformist clergyman, bequeathed to the institution a library of 300 books, and £800 in cash. In 1873, the chartered University of Harvard, beside its building, grounds, and extensive library, possessed about threequarters of a million sterling in vested funds, twelve hundred students, and one hundred and ten professors of all grades. When Longfellow began to lecture here, the college in Harvard Square was the only structure of note in the place, Cambridge being but a village, to which most of the students walked along a three-mile road from "town," which was Boston. The college had just celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary. Josiah Quincy was its revered President; E. T. Channing was Professor of English Literature; Charles Beck, of Latin; Felton, of Greek; Henry Ware, of Divinity; and Charles Sumner, Lecturer in the Law School. Not far off, lived Washington Allston, then the best painter his country had produced—and a little of a poet also. Longfellow consorted chiefly with the Greek Professor-Cornelius Conway Felton, a warm-hearted, jovial scholar-and three other young and rising men joined themselves to him; the three being Sumner, George Stillman Hillard, and Henry R. Cleveland. These friends, all of an age, resolved themselves into an association for the promotion of nice dinners and good digestive talk, calling themselves the "Five of Clubs." As they grew more powerful in literature they helped each other in the reviews, and a man who read Felton's paper on "Evangeline," in The North American Review, pencilled under Longfellow's name, "Insured in the Mutual." These were days when some of our British authors were great dandies. Bulwer Lytton did not assort his paragraphs more carefully than he studied the pattern of his waistcoats; and Disraeli, who dressed in London like a creation of Count D'Orsay's pictorial imagination, fascinated Europe during his first tour with an armoury of dress walking-sticks. We need not feel much surprise, then, to learn that Longfellow figured at Harvard as a sort of fashion-plate for the youth of the place to admire. He makes the Baron say to Paul Flemming (that is, Longfellow) in "Hyperion": "The ladies already begin to call you Wilhelm Meister, and they say that your gloves are a shade too light for a strictly virtuous young man." This is not the kind of smart saying that Longfellow's mind could invent, and almost certainly was a real remark of the Russian, Von Ramm. Ward writes to him, after he had left Europe, "I have for you an Endymion waistcoat better suited to your style than mine," and a Mrs. Craigie at Cambridge, of whom we are to hear immediately, vaguely distrusted him because he looked too gay. He himself wrote to Sumner, when Sumner was abroad, "If you have any tendency to 'curl your hair and wear gloves,' like Edgar in 'Lear,' do it before your return." Now this liking to be well-dressed was in truth not so much an affectation in Longfellow, as a sign that he lacked affectation. His was a mind that was neat in all its workings, and even exquisite; it required its external circumstances to be neat also, for comfort, and he was not the man to go about with his shoes untied, his hose ungartered, and all about him betokening a careless desolation, as if by these means to gain more credit for concealed beauties of a vast mind. Poète ou pas poète, j'aime du linge propre. Cæsar tramped along by his men on foot in preference to riding luxuriously; but he always carried with him. the little lozenges of ivory, wherewith the tesselated floor of his tent could be put together; and his toilet was exquisite. There was not a man in America who worked harder than the Harvard Professor of Modern Languages; but this was no reason why he should allow any man to be better dressed. To the end of his life he was punctilious about his appearance. After he had been staying with Dickens, that ever-whimsical brother-inletters wrote to him: "McDowall the bootmaker, Beale the hosier, Laffin the trowsers-maker, and Blackmore the coat-cutter, have all been at the point of death; but have slowly recovered. The medical gentlemen agreed that it was exhaustion occasioned by early rising-to wait upon you at those unholy hours!" At first Professor Longfellow occupied rooms in Professors' Row at Cambridge-now called Kirkland Street; but ere long he found a better home in Craigie House. Craigie House will be revered in Cambridge while its wooden walls can be held together; for it has been the abode of George Washington as well as of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was built about 1760 by a wealthy Colonel Vassall, and was confiscated by the State when its owner joined the King's side during the Revolution. After the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Washington fixed upon it for his head-quarters, and here he remained nine months till the evacuation of Boston by the British troops. Then the house passed through several hands, until a retired "Apothecary-General," called Andrew Craigie, made it the scene of lavish hospitalities, which were accepted by guests so distinguished as Talleyrand and the Duke of Kent. When Mr. Craigie died, he left an eccentric widow well-nigh penniless; and the lady was forced to eke out her income by letting her house in apartments. Thus was Longfellow enabled to cherish the notion of taking up quarters in rooms hallowed by memories of his country's father. When he made his first application to Mrs. Craigie, she would have nothing to do with him, thinking that so fashionable a young gentleman would not be likely to prove a quiet lodger. However he told her who he was, and then her manner changed, for Harvard College was to her a sort of Shechinah, and moreover, she had read "Outre-Mer." But still she was inclined to stickle a little. As each suite of rooms was shown to the visitor, and he became more and more impressed with the respectable solidity of the old-fashioned mansion, with its wood-carvings, and lofty ceilings, and deep windows, the proprietor said: "But you cannot have this set." At last Longfellow was ushered into a room in the front of the house, overlooking goodly meadows and the river Charles. It was a summer's day and the cool shadows that lay about the room made it appear all the larger, while not a sound without broke the peace of the place, and even the branches of elms that shaded the windows looked as still as if they were painted on the glass. "This is a room you can have," said the old turbaned lady called Mrs. Craigie. The visitor at once expressed his pleasure at receiving the offer, but his gratification must have been doubled as she added to her offer the comment that "This was General Washington's Chamber.” And in General Washington's chamber he set up his book-cases, and abode. Longfellow's duties at the University did not tax him as much as he had been taxed at Bowdoin. He had to deliver one lecture each week all through the year; to lecture twice a week besides in summer, on Belles Lettres; and to superintend the instructors in languages, personally examining each student once a month. This was full employment to a professor who looked at his work conscientiously, as Longfellow did; and from the following sketch of his first year's weekly lectures we can see that he did not shrink from making his students travel over much ground. I. Introduction. History of the French Language. 5 and 6. Swedish Literature. 7. Sketch of German Literature. 8, 9, 10. Life and Writings of Goethe. II and 12. Life and Writings of Jean Paul Richter. |