Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘ [71] by the high example and success of Mr. Irving. . . . It is not to be supposed that in adopting the form of Mr. Irving, the author has been guilty of any other imitation.’¹ This may in some sense be true, and yet it is impossible to compare the two books without seeing that kind of assimilation which is only made more thorough by being unconscious. Longfellow, even thus early, brought out more picturesquely and vividly than Irving the charm exerted by the continent of Europe over the few Americans who were exploring it. What Irving did in this respect for England, Longfellow did for the continental nations. None of the first German students from America, Ticknor, Cogswell, Everett, or Bancroft, had been of imaginative temperament, and although their letters, as since printed,² revealed Germany to America as the land of learning, it yet remained for Longfellow to portray all Europe from the point of view of the pilgrim. When he went to England in 1835, as we shall see, he carried with him for English publication the two volumes of one of the earliest literary tributes paid by the New World to the Old, ‘Outre-Mer.’

It is a curious fact that Mr. Samuel Longfellow, in his admirable memoir of his brother,