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(1827), which was an excellent companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be known, Goethe, Richter, and Korner, together with examples of that American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the German, and of which the ‘Legend of Peter Rugg,’ by William Austin, is the only specimen now remembered.
With this as a concluding volume, it will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry, and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature.
It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's early days.
For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as ‘a lovely woman in character and appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner that won all hearts.’1
Longfellow's salary at Bowdoin College was eight hundred dollars, as professor of modern
1 Every Other Saturday, i. 20.
Boston and New York, Hougton, Mifflin and company, 1902.
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