He reached home from Europe, after three years of absence, on August 11, 1829, looking toward Bowdoin College as his abode, and a professorship of modern languages as his future position. Up to this time, to be sure, the economical college had offered him only an instructorship. But he had shown at this point that quiet decision and firmness which marked him in all practical affairs, and which was not always quite approved by his more anxious father. In this case he carried his point, and he received on the 6th of September this simple record of proceedings from the college:-- "In the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College, Sept. 1st, 1829: Mr. Henry W. Longfellow having declined to accept the office of instructor in modern languages. "Voted, that we now proceed to the choice of a professor of modern languages. "And Mr. H. W. Longfellow was chosen." Thus briefly was the matter settled, and he was launched upon his life's career at the age of twenty-two. Of those who made up his circle of friends in later years, Holmes had just graduated from Harvard, Sumner was a Senior there, and Lowell was a schoolboy in Cambridge. Few American colleges had at that time special professors of modern languages, though George Ticknor had set a standard for them all. Longfellow had to prepare his own text-books--to translate "L'Homond's Grammar," to edit an excellent little volume of French "Proverbes Dramatiques," and a small Spanish Reader, "Novelas Españolas." He was also enlisted in a few matters outside, and drew up the outline of a prospectus for a girls' high school in Portland, such high schools being then almost as rare as professorships of modern languages. He was also librarian. He gave a course of lectures on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but there seems to have been no reference to German, which had not then come forward into the place in American education which it now occupies. As to literature, he wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, "Since my return I have written one piece of poetry, but have not published a line. You need not be alarmed on that score. I am all prudence now, since I can form a more accurate judgment of the merit of poetry. If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first." It was actually nine years. For the "North American Review" he wrote in April, 1831, an essay on "The Origin and Progress of the French Language." He afterwards sent similar papers to the same periodical upon the Italian and Spanish languages and literatures, each of these containing also original translations. Thus he entered on his career as a teacher, but another change in life also awaited him. {11 _Life_, i. 90, 91.} {12 _Life_, i. 165.} {13 Scudder's _Men and Letters_, 28, 29.} {14 Locke, _Essay on the Human Understanding_, bk. ii. ch. 10, "Of Retention."} CHAPTER VI MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRUNSWICK