It is always to be borne in mind that Longfellow's self-restrained and well-ordered temperament habitually checked him in the career of innovator. Both in public and private matters, it was his way to state his point of view and then await results. It is clear that his mental habit, his foreign experience, and the traditions of his immediate department predisposed him to favor the elective system in university training. This system, after temporary trial and abandonment, was now being brought forward once more and was destined this time to prevail. Towards this success, the prosperity of the Modern Language Department formed a perpetual argument, because it was there that the reform was first introduced. The records of the Faculty at that period give very little information as to the attitude of individual professors, and Longfellow may be viewed as having been for the most part a silent reformer. One finds, however, constant evidence in his diaries of the fact that his duties wore upon him. "I get very tired of the routine of this life." "This college work is like a great hand laid on all the strings of my lyre, stopping their vibrations." "How the days resemble each other and how sad it is to me that I cannot give them all to my poem." "I have fallen into a very unpoetic mood and cannot write." It must be remembered that his eyes were at this time very weak, that he suffered extremely from neuralgia, and that these entries were all made during the great fugitive slave excitement which agitated New England, and the political overturn in Massachusetts which culminated in the election of the poet's most intimate friend, Sumner, to the United States Senate. He records the occurrence of his forty-fourth birthday, and soon after when he is stereotyping the "Golden Legend" he says: "I still work a good deal upon it," but also writes, only two days after, "Working hard with college classes to have them ready for their examinations." A fortnight later he says: "Examination in my department; always to me a day of anguish and exhaustion." His correspondence is very large; visitors and dinner parties constantly increase. His mother dies suddenly, and he sits all night alone by her dead body; a sense of peace comes over him, as if there had been no shock or jar in nature, but a "harmonious close to a long life." Later he gets tired of summer rest at Nahant, which he calls "building up life with solid blocks of idleness;" but when two days later he goes back to Cambridge to resume his duties, he records: "I felt my neck bow and the pressure of the yoke." Soon after he says: "I find no time to write. I find more and more the little things of life shut out the great. Innumerable interruptions--letters of application for this and for that; endless importunities of foreigners for help here and help there--fret the day and consume it." He often records having half a dozen men to dine with him; he goes to the theatre, to lectures, concerts, and balls, has no