Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[123] Boston by the repetition at Harvard College, in 1833, of the poem delivered by him in the previous autumn before the Bowdoin Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa. At Cambridge the poem was, for some reason, given first in order, and Edward Everett, the orator, afterward announced that his subject also was “Education,” and that he was “but a follower in the field where the flashing sickle had already passed.” It is remembered that when the young professor afterward came to Harvard some of the Cambridge ladies were wont to speak of him as the Flashing Sickle.

Longfellow's first residence in Cambridge (1836) was in the large house now known as the Foxcroft House and maintained by the University as a students' boarding-house. Here he formed an intimacy with Professor Felton, “heartiest of Greek professors,” as Dickens called him; and the circle was often enlarged by the society of Charles Sumner, then librarian of the Law School; of George Stillman Hillard, then a young lawyer; and of Henry Russell Cleveland, an eminent scholar and