The Longfellows are descendants of William Longfellow of Horsforth in Yorkshire, who came to New England ‘about 1676,’ settled in Newbury, and married Anne Sewall, a sister of Samuel Sewall, the first chief-justice of Massachusetts. ‘Well educated but a little wild’ is one of several illuminating phrases used to describe this young Yorkshireman. He joined the expedition against Quebec under Sir William Phipps (1690) and perished in a wreck on the coast of Anticosti. One of his sons, Stephen, a blacksmith, had a son who was graduated at Harvard, became a schoolmaster in Falmouth (Portland), and held important offices in the town government. His son, the third Stephen, grandfather of the poet, was judge of the court of common pleas, and representative of his town in the legislature. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, in the District of Maine, on February 27, 1807. He was the second son of Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer, conspicuous in political life, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and afterwards, when Maine acquired statehood, a representative for his state in Congress. The mother of the poet, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was a daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, whose adventures during the Revolution bordered on the romantic. Through the Wadsworths the poet was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. At the age of thirteen Longfellow printed in the Portland ‘Gazette’ his boyish rhymes on ‘The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.’ He studied at private schools and at the Portland Academy, entered Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in the Sophomore year, and was graduated in 1825, the fourth in a class of thirty-eight. That he stood so high seemed to him ‘rather a mystery.’ Before leaving college he had begun contributing to the ‘United States Literary Gazette,’ a new bi-monthly, published in Boston and edited by Theophilus Parsons. In one year seventeen of his poems appeared in the ‘Gazette,’ for which payment was made at the rate of two dollars a column. Five of these early poems were reprinted in _Voices of the Night_. At the Commencement of 1825 the trustees of Bowdoin had determined to establish a professorship of modern languages. The chair was promised Longfellow when he should have fitted himself for it by study abroad. He sailed from New York in May, 1826, provided by George Ticknor with letters of introduction to Irving, Eichhorn, and Southey. He travelled in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, mastered the Romance languages, planned certain prose volumes, and announced to his sister Elizabeth that his poetic career was finished. In August, 1829, he was back in America.