College, for it was in that pleasant apartment, looking out on the
pine groves, that the young poet of nineteen wrote many of those
beautiful earlier pieces, now collected in his works. These early
poems were all composed in 1824 and 1825, during his last years in
college, and were printed first in a periodical called 'The United
States Literary Gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once
kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle
down to the study of law! 'No good can come of it,' he said; 'don't
let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' But the pine-trees
waving outside his window kept up a perpetual melody in his heart, and
he could not choose but sing back to them."

One of the earliest pictures I find of the every-day life of
Longfellow when a youth is a little anecdote told by him, in humorous
illustration of the woes of young authors. I quote from a brief diary.
"Longfellow amused us to-day by talking of his youth, and especially
with a description of the first poem he ever wrote, called 'The Battle
of Lovell's Pond.' It was printed in a Portland newspaper one morning,
and the same evening he was invited to the house of the Chief Justice
to meet his son, a rising poet just returned from Harvard. The judge
rose in a stately manner during the evening and said to his son: 'Did
you see a poem in to-day's paper upon the Battle of Lovell's Pond?'
'No, sir,' said the boy, 'I did not.' 'Well, sir,' responded his
father, 'it was a very stiff production. G----, get your own poem on
the same subject, and I will read it to the company.' The poem was
read aloud, while the perpetrator of the 'stiff production' sat, as he
said, very still in a corner."

The great sensitiveness of his nature, one of the poetic qualities,
was observed very early, and the description of him as a little boy