Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly ambitious reader, and
had followed the successive numbers of Irving's "Sketch Book," he
tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and delight." His college
offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and
he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught
successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen
years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at
Harvard, ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early
published two prose volumes, "Hyperion" and "Outre-mer,"
Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, after ten
years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden
impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know
not why," "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death." From
that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was
Longfellow the Poet.

His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic
incident, save the one tragic accident by which his second wife,
the mother of his children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He
bore the calamity with the quiet courage of his race and
breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly and gently, enriched
with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms of
circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to
dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal
contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a
good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even
interested in local Cambridge politics. On the larger political
issues of his day his Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is
disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to
see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men