Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[46] at Harvard College to which Longfellow was destined to succeed at a later day. Professor Ticknor had himself recently returned from a German university, and urged the young man to begin his studies there, giving him letters of introduction to Professor Eichhorn, to Robert Southey, and to Washington Irving, then in Europe.

He sailed on the ship Cadmus, Captain Allen, and wrote to his mother from Havre that his passage of thirty days had been a dreary blank, and that the voyage was very tiresome because of the continual talking of French and broken English, adding, ‘For Frenchmen, you know, talk incessantly, and we had at least a dozen of them with us.’ In spite of this rather fatiguing opportunity, he was not at once at home in French, but wrote ere long, ‘I am coming on famously, I assure you.’ He wrote from Auteuil, where he soon went, ‘Attached to the house is an extensive garden, full of fruit-trees, and bowers, and alcoves, where the boarders ramble and talk from morning till night. This makes the situation an excellent one for me; I can at any time hear French conversation,—for the French are always talking. Besides, the conversation is the purest of French, inasmuch as persons from the highest circles in Paris are residing here, —amongst others, an old gentleman who was ’