From the highest point on Great Diamond, one of the larger islands in the harbor, little Henry could see, sometimes, as the sun was setting behind the hills of Portland, the hazy blue and pink outlines of the White Mountains, more than a hundred miles away. Any boy with eyes and heart to take in the deep meaning of it all would have wanted to be a poet. Henry’s inner nature throbbed in response to the beauties of Nature without, and because he had the gift of putting his feelings into words, he was a poet long before he or those around him realized it. Like the boy Benjamin Franklin and the boy George Washington, who lived about a hundred years before him, the Longfellow boy had the best chances to hear the sailors who came into port tell their tales of the sea--of pirates and hairbreadth adventures. Henry’s grandfather--his mother’s father--was bluff old General Peleg Wadsworth, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He could tell stories of the struggle for independence that would have fired the soul of any boy. [Illustration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.] In the War of 1812, when the little Longfellow lad was only five, a company of American soldiers was stationed in the fort at Portland to defend the town against attacks from British warships. Young as Henry was, he understood what all the excitement meant. When he was in his seventh year, he heard the booming of the cannon in the great sea battle between the American brig _Enterprise_ and the British schooner _Boxer_. Both commanders were killed and buried on one of the hills of Portland. There was a sensation when the _Enterprise_ towed the _Boxer_ into port as a prize of war. In the poem, “My Lost Youth,” nearly fifty years after the battle, Longfellow wrote: “I remember the sea-fight far away How it thundered o’er the tide! And the dead captains as they lay In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay Where they in battle died.” Out near Hiram, Maine, where the Wadsworth family lived, there was a little lake known as Lovell’s Pond. On one of his visits to his grandfather’s, young Henry heard the story of a battle which had taken place there during the French and Indian War. When he was thirteen he wrote four stanzas which he named “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.” Signing it “Henry,” he left it at the office of the Portland _Gazette_, telling only his sister what he had done. A writer has told a story of the way Henry’s first published poem was received: “In the morning how slowly the father unfolded the damp sheet, and how carefully he dried it at the open fire before he began to read it! And how much foreign news there seemed to be in it!