Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[23] ‘United States Literary Gazette.’ This was published in Boston and New York simultaneously, having been founded by the late Theophilus Parsons, but edited at that time by James G. Carter, of Boston, well known in connection with the history of public schools. Apparently Longfellow must have offered poems to the ‘Gazette’ anonymously, for one of his classmates records that when he met Mr. Carter in Boston the editor asked with curiosity what young man sent him such fine poetry from Bowdoin College. A modest volume of ‘Miscellaneous Poems, selected from the “United States literary Gazette,” ’ appeared in 1826,—the year after Longfellow left college,—and it furnished by far the best exhibit of the national poetry up to that time. The authors represented were Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Dawes, Mellen, and Jones; and it certainly offered a curious contrast to that equally characteristic volume of 1794, the ‘Columbian Muse,’ whose poets were Barlow, Trumbull, Freneau, Dwight, Humphreys, and a few others, not a single poem or poet being held in common by the two collections.

This was, however, only a volume of extracts, but it is the bound volumes of the ‘Gazette’ itself—beginning with April 1, 1824—which most impress the student of early American