Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[55] literary career, we find from his letter to his father, May 15, 1829, that while hearing lectures in German and studying faithfully that language, he was, as he says, ‘writing a book, a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain, and Italy.’ We shall presently encounter this book under the name of ‘Outre-Mer.’ He connects his two aims by saying in the same letter, ‘One must write and write correctly, in order to teach.’ Again he adds, ‘The further I advance, the more I see to be done. The more, too, I am persuaded of the charlatanism of literary men. For the rest, my fervent wish is to return home.’ His brother tells us that among his note-books of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to the children of Cambridge, in 1880: ‘Thus the ideas as well as the children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.’¹ He also included a quotation from John Lyly's ‘Endymion,’ which ten years later furnished the opening of his own ‘Hyperion.’