Thus all the hopes I had so fondly cherished of returning home with my dear Mary in happiness and renovated health have in the providence of God ended in disappointment and sorrow unspeakable. All that I have left to me in my affliction is the memory of her goodness, her gentleness, her affection for me--unchangeable in life and in death--and the hope of meeting her again hereafter, where there shall be no more sickness, nor sorrow, nor suffering, nor death. I feel, too, that she must be infinitely, oh, infinitely happier now than when with us on earth, and I say to myself,-- "Peace! peace! she is not dead, she does not sleep! She has awakened from the dream of life." With my most affectionate remembrance to Eliza and Margaret, and my warmest sympathies with you all, very truly yours, HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. On the 2d of December the young husband left Rotterdam for Heidelberg. There he spent the winter, like Paul Flemming of "Hyperion," and buried himself in "old dusty books." He met many men who interested him, Schlosser, Gervinus, and Mittermaier, and also Bryant, the poet, from his own country, whom he saw for the first time. An added sorrow came to him in the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend, George W. Pierce, "He the young and strong," as he afterwards wrote in his "Footsteps of Angels;" but in accordance with the advice of his friend Ticknor he absorbed himself in intellectual labor, taking the direction of a careful study of German literature. This he traced from its foundations down to Jean Paul Richter, who was for him, as for many other Americans of the same period, its high-water mark, even to the exclusion of Goethe. It will be remembered that Longfellow's friend, Professor Felton, translated not long after, and very likely with Longfellow's aid or counsel, Menzel's "History of German Literature," in which Goethe is made quite a secondary figure. It is also to be noticed that George Bancroft, one of the half dozen men in America who had studied at a German University, wrote about the same time a violent attack on Goethe in the Boston "Christian Examiner," in which he pronounced him far inferior to Voltaire, "not in genius and industry only, but still more in morality." He says of him farther, "He imitates, he reproduces, he does not create and he does not build up.... His chances at popularity are diminishing. Twaddle will not pass long for wisdom. The active spirit of movement and progress finds in his works little that attracts sympathy."{34} It is to be remembered in the same connection that Longfellow, in 1837, wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, of "Jean Paul Richter, the most magnificent of the German prose writers,"{35} and it was chiefly on Richter that his prose style was formed.