unceasing hospitality. He was a tender father, a devoted friend, and a
faithful citizen, and yet something apart and different from all these.

From his early youth Longfellow was a scholar. Especially was his
power of acquiring language most unusual.

As his reputation widened, he was led to observe this to be a gift as
well as an acquirement. It gave him the convenient and agreeable power
of entertaining foreigners who sought his society. He said one
evening, late in life, that he could not help being struck with the
little trouble it was to him to recall any language he had ever
studied, even though he had not spoken it for years. He had found
himself talking Spanish, for instance, with considerable ease a few
days before. He said he could not recall having even read anything in
Spanish for many years, and it was certainly thirty since he had given
it any study. Also, it was the same with German. "I cannot imagine,"
he continued, "what it would be to take up a language and try to
master it at this period of my life, I cannot remember how or when I
learned any of them;--to-night I have been speaking German, without
finding the least difficulty."

A scholar himself, he did not write for scholars, nor study for the
sole purpose of becoming a light to any university. It was the energy
of a soul looking for larger expansion; a spirit true to itself and
its own prompting, finding its way by labor and love to the free use
and development of the power within him. Of his early years some
anecdotes have been preserved in a private note-book which have not
appeared elsewhere; among them this bit of reminiscence from
Hawthorne, who said, in speaking of his own early life and the days at
Bowdoin College, where he and Longfellow were in the same class, that