Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[168] to Congress from the Liberty Party, and had added, ‘Our friends think they could throw for thee one thousand more votes than for any other man.’¹ Nor was Whittier himself ever a disunionist, even on anti-slavery grounds.

It is interesting to note that it was apparently the anti-slavery question which laid the foundation for the intimacy between Longfellow and Lowell. Lowell had been invited, on the publication of ‘A Year's Life,’ to write for an annual which was to appear in Boston and to be edited, in Lowell's own phrase, ‘by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard and that set.’² Lowell subsequently wrote in the ‘Pioneer’ kindly notices of Longfellow's ‘Poems on Slavery,’ but there is no immediate evidence of any personal relations between them at that time. In a letter to Poe, dated at Elmwood June 27, 1844, Lowell says of a recent article in the ‘Foreign Quaterly Review’ attributed to John Forster, ‘Forster is a friend of some of the Longfellow clique here, which perhaps accounts for his putting L. at the top of our Parnassus. These kinds of arrangements do very well, however, for the present.’³ . . . It will be noticed that what Lowell had originally called a ‘set’ has now become a ‘clique.’