It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring, seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers a calculation of an eclipse. She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss Gushing in Hingham. "My first impression of her," wrote in later years the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,--who was professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,--"is of an attractive person, blooming in health and beauty, the graceful bride of a very attractive and elegant young man." Some books from her girlish library now lie before me, dingy and time-worn, with her name in varying handwriting from the early "Mary S. Potter" to the later "Mary S. P. Longfellow." They show many marked passages and here and there a quotation. The collection begins with Miss Edgeworth's "Harry and Lucy;" then follow somewhat abruptly "Sabbath Recreations," by Miss Emily Taylor, and "The Wreath, a selection of elegant poems from the best authors,"--these poems including the classics of that day, Beattie's "Minstrel," Blair's "Grave," Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Traveller," and some lighter measures from Campbell, Moore, and Burns. The sombre muse undoubtedly predominated, but on the whole the book was not so bad an elementary preparation for the training of a poet's wife. It is a touching accidental coincidence that one of the poems most emphatically marked is one of the few American poems in these volumes, Bryant's "Death of the Flowers," especially the last verse, which describes a woman who died in her youthful beauty. To these are added books of maturer counsel, as Miss Bowdler's "Poems and Essays," then reprinted from the sixteenth English edition, but now forgotten, and Mrs. Barbauld's "Legacy for Young Ladies," discussing beauty, fashion, botany, the uses of history, and especially including a somewhat elaborate essay on "female studies," on which, perhaps, Judge Potter founded his prohibition of the classics. Mrs. Barbauld lays down the rule that "the learned languages, the Greek especially, require a great deal more time than a young woman can conveniently spare. To the Latin," she adds, "there is not an equal objection ... and it will not," she