Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[36] be more simple, delightful, and free from clouds than the whole intercourse between Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow. To those outside their own circle, and especially to Margaret Fuller, this cordiality did not always extend, but it is to be noted that as she permanently removed from Cambridge, her birthplace, in 1833, before Lowell had even entered college and before Longfellow had become a Harvard professor, she formed no part of the local group. The conservative Holmes, who had been a schoolmate of hers, rather sympathized with Lowell's attack upon her;¹ but when she criticised Longfellow in the New York Tribune, the latter only mentions it in his journal as “what might be called a bilious attack,” and on hearing the news of her death he writes: “What a calamity! A singular woman for New England to produce; original and somewhat self-willed, but full of talent and full of work. A tragic end to a somewhat troubled and romantic life.” It would indeed have been difficult, perhaps, for mutual jealousy