Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[27] attention at the time. Mr. Parsons, the proprietor of the magazine, was thoroughly convinced of the vigor and originality of the young man's mind, and informed him that one of his poems, ‘Autumnal Nightfall,’ had been attributed to Bryant, while his name was mentioned in the ‘Galaxy’ on a level with that of Bryant and Percival. The leadership of Bryant was of course unquestioned at that period, and Longfellow many years after acknowledged to that poet his indebtedness, saying, ‘When I look back upon my early years, I cannot but smile to see how much in them is really yours. It was an involuntary imitation, which I most readily confess.’

Still more interesting as a study in the ‘Literary Gazette’ itself are three prose studies, distinctly after the manner of Irving, and headed by a very un-American title, ‘The Lay Monastery.’ There is a singular parallelism between this fanciful title and the similar transformation in verse, at about the same time, in the ‘Hymn of the Moravian Nuns’ at the consecration of Pulaski's banner. As in that poem a plain Moravian sisterhood, who supported their house by needlework, gave us an imaginary scene amid a chancel with cowled heads, glimmering tapers, and mysterious aisles, so the solitary in this prose article leads us into the society of an old