Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[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