sought in serious and constant study a relief from
suffering, bereavement, and dejection. For a time
lie was cheered by the companionship of Bryant,
whom he met here for the first time. In the spring
he made some excursions in the beautiful regions
in the neighborhood of the Rhine, and he spent
the summer in Switzerland and the Tyrol. In
September he was at Paris, and in October he
returned home.
In December, 1836, he established himself at Cambridge, and entered upon his duties as pro- fessor. For the remainder of his life Cambridge was to be his home. Lowell, in his delightful es- say, " Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," has preserved the image of the village much as it was at this period. The little town was not yet suburbanized ; it was dominated by the college, whose professors, many of them men of note, formed a cultivated and agreeable society. Limited as were its intellectual resources as compared with those that it has since acquired, its was the chief centre in New England of literary activity and cultivated intelligence. Longfellow soon found friends, who speedily be- came closely attached to him, both in Boston and Cambridge, alike of the elder and younger genera- tion of scholars, chief among whom were George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, Andrews Norton, John G. Palfrey, Cornelius C. Felton, Charles Sum- ner, George S. Hillard, and Henry R. Cleveland. His delightful qualities of heart and mind, his so- cial charm, his wide and elegant culture, his refine- ment, the sweetness of his temper, the opeimess of his nature, and his quick sympathies, made him a rare acquisition in any society, and secured for him warm regard and affection. He employed himself busily in instruction and the writing of lectures, and in 1837 he began once more to give himself to poetry, and wrote the poems that were to be the foundation of his future lame. In the autumn of this year he took up his residence at Craigie House, a fine old colonial mansion, consecrated by memories of Washington's stay in it, which was thenceforward to be his abode for life. Here, in 1837, he wrote " The Reaper and the Flowers," and in June, 1838, "The Psalm of Life," which, on its publication in the Knickerbocker Magazine" for October, instantly becaine popular, and made its author's name well known. It was the sound of a new voice, a most musical and moving one, in American poetry. In February, 1838, he was lec- turing on Dante ; in the summer of that year his course was on "The Lives of Literary Men." He was writing also for the " North American Re- view," and during the year he began his " Hype- rion." It was a busy and fruitful time. "Hyperion" was published in New York in 1839. It was a ro- mance based upon personal experience. The scene was laid among the sites he had lately visited in Europe ; the characters were drawn in part from life. He put into his story the pain, the passion, and the ideals of his heart. It was a book to touch the soul of fervent youth. It had much beauty of fancy, and it showed how deeply the imagination of the young American had been stirred by the poetic associations of Europe, and enriched by the abundant sources of foreign culture. It was hardly out of press before it was followed by the publica- tion, in the late autumn, of his first volume of poems, "Voices of the Night." This contained, in addition to his recent poems, a selection of seven of his early poems — all that he wished to preserve — and numerous translations from the Spanish, Italian, and German. The little volume of 144 pages contained poems that were stamped with the impress of an original genius whose voice was of a tone unheard before. " The Psalm of Life," " The Reaper and the Flowers," " The Foot- steps of Angels," " The Beleaguered City," speed- ily became popular, and have remained familiar to English readers from that day to this. " Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world — this western world, I mean," wrote his friend Hawthorne. Before a year was out the vol- ume had come to a third edition. From this time Longfellow's fame grew rapidly. Success and repu- tation were to him but stimulants to new exertions. Essentially modest and simple, praise or flattery could do him no harm. His genial and sound na- ture turned all experience to good.
During the next two or three years, while his laborious duties as instructor were faithfully and successfully discharged, he still found time for study, and his vein of poetry was in full flow. In 1841 his second volume of poems was published ; it was entitled " Ballads and other Poems," and con- tained, among other well-known pieces, " The Wreck of the Hesperus," " The Village Blacksmith," and " Excelsior." It confirmed the impression that had been made by the " Voices of the Night," and hence- forth Longfellow stood confessedly as the most widely read and the best beloved of American poets. In the spring of 1842, his health having been for some time in an unsatisfactory state, he received leave of absence for six months from the college, and went abroad. After a short stay in Paris he made a journey, abounding in interest and poetic suggestions, through Belgium, visiting Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels, and proceeded to Marienberg-on-the Rhine, where he spent a quiet but pleasant summer at a water-cure establishment. Here he made acquaintance with the German poet Freiligrath, and the cordial friendship then formed with him was maintained by letters until Freili- grath's death, more than thirty years afterward. In October he passed some delightful days in Lon- don, as the guest of Charles Dickens, with whom he had come into very cordial relations in America early in the same year, and in November he was again at home engaged in his familiar pursuits. On the return voyage he wrote " Poems on Sla- very," which were published in a thin pamphlet be- fore the end of the year. They were the expression not so much of poetic emotion as of moral feeling. They attracted much attention, as the testimony of a poet, by nature disinclined to censure, against the great national crime of which the worst evil was its corrupting influence upon the public conscience. It was to that conscience that these poems appealed, and they were received on the one hand with warm approval, on the other with still warmer condemnation. In June, 1843, he married Frances Appleton, daughter of the Hon. Nathan Appleton, of Boston. He had been attached to her since their first meeting in Switzerland in 1836, and something of his feeling toward her had been revealed in his delineation of the character of Mary Ashbuiton in "Hyperion." She was a woman whose high and rare qualities of character found harmonious expression in beauty of person and nobility of presence. Seldom has there been a happier marriage. From this time forward for many years Longfellow's life flowed on as peacefully and with as much joy as ever falls to man. His fortunes were prosperous. His books were beginning to bring him in a considerable income ; his wife's dowry was such as to secure to him pecuniary ease; Craigie House, with the pleasant fields in front of it reaching to the river Charles, was now his own, and his means enabled him to gratify his taste for a refined hospitality no less than to satisfy the generous impulses
