Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[73] Scudder's list of his juvenile or unacknowledged poems. To complicate the matter still farther, there is also a story called ‘David Whicher,’ dated Bowdoin College, June 1, 1831, this being a period when Longfellow was at work there, and yet this story is wholly remote in style from ‘The Indian Summer,’ being a rather rough and vernacular woodman's tale. Of the two, ‘The Indian Summer’ seems altogether the more likely to be his work, and indeed bears a distinct likeness to the equally tragic tale of ‘Jacqueline’ in ‘Outre-Mer,’ —the one describing the funeral of a young girl in America, the other in Europe, both of them having been suggested, possibly, by the recent death of his own sister.

In the second volume of ‘The Token’ (1833) the puzzle is yet greater, for though there are half a dozen stories without initials, or other clue to authorship, yet not one of them suggests Longfellow at all, or affords the slightest clue by which it can be connected with him, while on the other hand there is a poem occupying three pages and signed H. W. L., called ‘An Evening in Autumn.’ This was never included by him among his works, nor does it appear in the list of his juvenile poems and translations in the Appendix to Mr. Scudder's edition of his ‘Complete Poetical Works,’ yet the initials leave hardly a doubt