Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. You can also browse the collection for December 31st or search for December 31st in all documents.

Your search returned 1 result in 1 document section:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 4: literature as a pursuit (search)
re attention to the opinion of philosophers, that nothing but Nature can qualify a man for knowledge. Whether Nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief, I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of law. Again on December 31 he writes to his father, by way of New Year's gift, Let me reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres, and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I could make in the literary world. If I fail here, there is still time enough left for the study of a profession; and while residing at Cambridge, I shall have acquired the knowledge of some foreign languages which will be, through life, of the grea