Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

“ [141] all this college tackle hanging round me.” “A day of hard work. Six hours in the recitation room — like a schoolmaster! It is pleasant enough when the mind gets engaged in it, but --Art is long and life is short.” Then there are such summaries of a year as this: “How barren of all poetic production, and even prose production, this last year has been! For 1853 I have absolutely nothing to show. Really, there has been nothing but the college work. The family absorbs half the time; and letters and visits take out a huge cantle.” Lowell's letters are full of similar complaints, more impulsively made, and relieved by countless jokes against himself. The difference was that Longfellow's more even temperament made him more methodical and orderly, and also more chary of self-expression, so that although he might be as much bored with his work, his pupils would find it out less readily. Indeed, Lowell's pupils discovered it easily enough. He yawned occasionally on entering the room, an act of which the ever courteous Longfellow would have been incapable, as he would also of a certain cynical tone by which Lowell sometimes