“At last, Henry and the sister who shared his secret peeped over their parent’s shoulder--and the poem was there! They spent most of the day reading it. In the evening they went to play with a son of Judge Mellen, and while the judge was sitting by the fire in the twilight with the young folk and a few older neighbors around him, he said, “Did you see the piece in to-day’s paper? Very stiff, remarkably stiff! Moreover, it is all borrowed--every word of it!” When Henry was fifteen, his father sent him to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, with his older brother, Stephen. Though the father was himself a graduate of Harvard, he was a director of this new college in his own state. Henry was graduated at eighteen and, young though he was, the trustees of the college invited him to come back, a few years later, as their professor of modern languages. So the young graduate traveled in Europe to gain a speaking knowledge of all the languages he would have to teach. At the age of twenty-two, he became a professor at Bowdoin. After five years at his own college, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was chosen Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. He spent the first year in Europe. The next year he began his work as a Harvard professor. He boarded at the Craigie mansion, which had been General Washington’s headquarters during the first year of the War for Independence, sixty years before. Indeed, he slept in the same room occupied by the Father of his Country as a bedroom. Although he had published several books of poetry, Longfellow’s poems did not begin to be popular till “A Psalm of Life” was published, in his thirty-third year. This poem made many people talk about him. Ministers preached about it, and the lines were set to music. Here is one stanza of this famous poem: “Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints in the sands of time.” Then such short poems as “Excelsior,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “The Day Is Done,” and many others, were recited in schools and sung in thousands of homes. Of Longfellow’s longer poems, “Evangeline” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” are, perhaps, the most popular. It is said that more people know of the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth through the latter poem than by reading the history of the country. It is a story of the lovely Priscilla and her true lover, John Alden, who came to ask her to marry Miles Standish. That little captain was brave enough to fight with savages, but he shrank from the bright eyes of Priscilla Mullens. John Alden was a true soldier and delivered his captain’s message, but Priscilla, knowing his loyal heart, only smiled at him and asked: “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” And one of the great-great-great-grandsons of John Alden and his lovely wife, Priscilla, was the poet Longfellow!