Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring, seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers a calculation of an eclipse.

She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss Cushing in Hingham. ‘My first impression of her,’ wrote in later years the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,—who was professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,—‘is of an attractive person, blooming in health and beauty, the graceful bride of a very attractive and elegant ’