pleased with them." ... To which she replies: "I wish you would bring
Gray home with you. I have a strong inclination to read the poems,
since you commend them so highly. I think I should be pleased with
them, though Dr. Johnson was not. I do not think the Doctor possessed
much sensibility to the charms of poetry, and he was sometimes most
unmerciful in his criticism."

The single aim of Longfellow's life, the manner in which from his
earliest days he dedicated himself to Letters, would prove alone, if
other signs were lacking, the strength of his character. When he was
only eighteen he wrote to his mother: "With all my usual delinquency,
however, I should have answered your letter before this, had I not
received, on Monday, Chatterton's Works, for which I had some time
since sent to Boston. It is an elegant work in three large octavo
volumes; and since Monday noon I have read the greater part of two of
them, besides attending two lectures a day, of an hour each, and three
recitations of the same length, together with my study-hours for
preparation."

This is said to have been the first handsome book the young student
owned, and it was earned by the work of his pen. In this same year,
too, we find him hurrying with his lessons (not slighting them), that
he might get leisure to read and think. "Leisure," he wrote his
father, "which is to me one of the sweetest things in the world." ...
"I wish I could read and write at the same time."

The eager activity of his mind was already asserting itself, an
activity which hardly slackened to the very end.

The severe criticism of his poem on the Battle of Lovell's Pond may