In the following year (1831) the routine of his life at Brunswick was interrupted by his marriage with Mary Storer Potter, one of the most beautiful and generally liked young women of Portland. Her education and tastes were such that they enabled her to share heartily her husband's interests, and this sympathetic association in the work to which he was devoted seemed to fill the measure of the young professor's happiness. During the years spent in teaching at Bowdoin the career of Henry Longfellow as a professional writer had run parallel with that of teaching. In response to an invitation he had contributed various prose articles to the _North American Review_ had written some poetry, and by 1835 had completed his _Outre-Mer_, a collection of prose sketches of his travels. Not long before the publication of this work the author had received a most desirable offer of the Smith professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard University, with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. In accepting the position the young man decided upon a trip abroad for the purpose of further study. Accordingly, with his wife he set sail for Hamburg in June, 1835. They stayed for a short time in London, where they met Carlyle, traveled then to Stockholm and Copenhagen, where the summer was passed in learning the Swedish and Danish languages, and in October reached Amsterdam. Here Mrs. Longfellow fell ill, and while she was recovering her husband undertook the study of Dutch. In Rotterdam Mrs. Longfellow again became ill, and died in that city on October 29. The loss fell so heavily upon Longfellow that he could not speak nor write of it. However, he disciplined himself to work and spent several months at Heidelberg, gaining a fuller knowledge of the German language and literature. In this city he met for the first time the poet Bryant. After traveling in Switzerland he returned to America late in 1836. At the close of the same year he established himself at Cambridge, and there began a career of large usefulness and success at Harvard University. At the same time he wrote extensively both prose and verse, and by the time of his third visit to Europe, in 1842, had produced the prose romance _Hyperion_ as well as the volumes of verse entitled _Voices of the Night_ and _Ballads and Other Poems_ and the drama _The Spanish Student_.