humorous turn which afterwards so strongly marked his writings; but his
first effort in verse, as he himself told me, was made during his
residence at college. The themes, or exercises, of his fellow students
in English composition, whether prose or rhyme, were well characterized
by the lack of native thought and feeling, the cold pedantry, the
mimicry of classic models, common to all such productions. Mr.
Fessenden had the good taste to disapprove of these vapid and spiritless
performances, and resolved to strike out a new course for himself. On
one occasion, when his classmates had gone through with their customary
round of verbiage and threadbare sentiment, he electrified them and
their instructor, President Wheelock, by reading "_Jonathan's
Courtship_." There has never, to this day, been produced by any of our
countrymen a more original and truly Yankee effusion. He had caught the
rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the
very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each
line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor. This
excellent ballad compels me to regret, that, instead of becoming a
satirist in politics and science, and wasting his strength on temporary
and evanescent topics, he had not continued to be a rural poet. A
volume of such sketches as "Jonathan's Courtship," describing various
aspects of life among the yeomanry of New England, could not have failed
to gain a permanent place in American literature. The effort in
question met with unexampled success: it ran through the newspapers of
the day, reappeared on the other side of the Atlantic, and was warmly
applauded by the English critics; nor has it yet lost its popularity.
New editions may be found every year at the ballad-stalls; and I saw
last summer, on the veteran author's table, a broadside copy of his
maiden poem, which he had himself bought in the street.

Mr. Fessenden passed through college with a fair reputation for