With Modjeska’s first American tour began the formation of that circle of friendships outside the theatre that would alone mark her as an extraordinary woman. The names must suffice: Longfellow, Richard Watson Gilder, Grant, Sherman, Henry Watterson, Eugene Field; and in Europe: Tennyson, Lowell, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Watts, Justin McCarthy, George Brandes, Hans von Bülow. With Longfellow, perhaps, was her most cherished friendship. During her first visit to Boston he called on her at her hotel and she and her son went to his house in Cambridge. “I said I would gladly study some passages from his poems and recite them to him, and I mentioned _Hiawatha_, but he stopped me with the words: ‘You do not want to waste your time in memorizing those things, and don’t you speak of _Hiawatha_, or I will call you Mudjikiewis, which, by the way, sounds somewhat like your name.’”[66] It was Longfellow who urged Modjeska to act in London--the very summit of her ambition. When in 1880 she had repeated there her American success he wrote to her: “Now I can add my congratulations on your triumphal entry into London. How pleasant it is to be able to say, ‘I told you so!’ And did I not tell you so? Am I not worthy to be counted among the Minor Prophets? I cannot tell you how greatly rejoiced I am at this new success--this new wreath of laurel.” For London was immediately won. Public, critics, society and fellow actors united to make her welcome. Poland, a small and unhappy country, has done more than its share in furnishing the world with artists. With some of the most famous of them Modjeska’s name is curiously linked. Paderewski, during her visit to Poland in 1884, used to come to visit her. He was then a young man of twenty-one whom it was impossible to keep away from the piano. She encouraged him, overcame his doubts as to his fitness for a public career, and that summer they appeared in the same program in Cracow. They were friends during the rest of her life, and it was Paderewski who in 1905 inspired the great farewell testimonial to Modjeska in New York. “The first encouraging words I heard as a pianist,” he wrote, “came from her lips; the first successful concert I had in my life was due to her assistance.” It was she, too, who years before, in a Polish mountain summer resort, first brought Jan and Eduard de Reszke before an audience. They were both then under twenty.