Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[139] Feb. 27, 1807. Through the Wadsworths and the Bartletts, the poet could trace his descent to at least four of the Mayflower pilgrims, including Elder Brewster and Captain John Alden. His boyhood showed nothing of the unruliness which people commonly associate with the idea of genius; indeed, the quiet sanity of his whole career was a refutation of that idle theory. He was a painstaking student, and made a very creditable record at Bowdoin College, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne for a classmate. Before his graduation, in 1825, he had quite made up his mind as. to what he wanted to do in life: it must be literature or nothing; and this not merely from a preference for the pursuit, but from an ambition, willingly acknowledged, to make a name as a writer.

He had no dream, however, of taking the world by storm. There seemed at first, indeed, to be little prospect of his making any direct step toward fitting himself for literature. There had been some question of his undertaking post-graduate work at Cambridge, but it had ended for the moment in his beginning the study of law in his father's office. Soon after his graduation,