Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[215] University, an eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker, but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of the participants in the supposed group are now living except Signor Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or less allied to the Longfellow family by the marriage of her younger brother, Mr. J. G. Thorp, to the poet's youngest daughter. The volume has always been popular, even its most ample form; yet most of the individual poems are rarely quoted, and with the exception of ‘Paul Revere's Ride’ and ‘Lady Wentworth’ they are not very widely read.