A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid the unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of Irving's Sketch Book, he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and delight." His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know not why," The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death. From that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was Longfellow the Poet. His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident, save the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with the quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the lips of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear for folk-lore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and