Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘ [68] a magazine for your amusement. I wrote “The schoolmaster” and the translation from Luis de Gorgora.’¹ It is worth mentioning that he adds, ‘Read “The late Joseph Natterstrom.” It is good.’ This was a story by William Austin, whose ‘Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,’ has just been mentioned as an early landmark of the period.² It is fair to say, however, that the critic of to-day can hardly see in these youthful pages any promise of the Longfellow of the future. The opening chapter, describing the author as a country schoolmaster, who plays with his boys in the afternoon, is only a bit of Irving diluted,—the later papers, ‘A Walk in Normandy,’ ‘The Village of Auteuil,’ etc., carrying the thing somewhat farther, but always in the same rather thin vein. Their quality of crudeness was altogether characteristic of the period, and although Holmes and Whittier tried their 'prentice hands with the best intentions in the same number of the ‘New England Magazine,’ they could not raise its level. We see in these compositions, as in the ‘Annuals’ of that day, that although Hawthorne had begun with his style already formed, yet that of Longfellow was still immature. This remark does not, indeed, apply to a version of a French