He wrote to his father, "The truth is that the heavy responsibility which I have taken upon myself. . . and the fear that you will be displeased about my expenses are hanging with a terrible weight upon me.”

The first autumn, in October, which to the end of his life was the most beautiful month of the year to him, he used to say, "Autumn has written his rubric on the illuminated leaves. The wind turns them over and chants like a friar," - he took a long journey on foot, and then spent eight months in Spain. Washington Irving was at Madrid, preparing his "Life of Columbus." "He seemed to be always at work," said Mr. Longfellow. "One summer morning, passing his house at the early hour of six, I saw his study window already wide open. On my mentioning it to him afterwards, he said, 'Yes, I am always at my work as early as six.'"

He visited Italy for a year, enjoying the sculptures of Florence, the lovely Bay of Naples, Rome, Venice ("the most wonderful city I ever beheld"), Vienna, and Prague, and then went to Germany. He wrote to his sisters, urging them to study the languages, saying that he was "completely enchanted" with them; that he spoke the French and Spanish as easily as English, read Portuguese without difficulty, and at the hotels was taken for an Italian from his excellent pronunciation of their language.

At Dresden, letters from Irving opened to him all literary and social advantages, and at Göttingen letters from Bancroft and Ticknor did the same. All this time the correspondence with his mother was an especial comfort. "For me," he wrote her, “a line from my mother is more efficacious than all the homilies preached in Lent, and I find more incitement to virtue in merely looking at your handwriting than in a whole volume of ethics and moral discourses. Indeed, there is no book in which I read with so much interest and profit as one of your letters."

At twenty-two he returned to America, and began his work at Bowdoin College with zest and hope. This year, 1829, he translated for his scholars a French grammar, and edited a collection of French proverbs and a small Spanish reader, for he said, "The young mind must be interested in order to be instructed."

Though not expected to do more than teach the languages, his interest in his work led him to prepare written lectures upon French, Spanish, and Italian literatures.

His

The new professor became deeply loved for his sympathy and aid. Besides, he was young, and has youth not a special charm of its own? manner of dealing with students was very happy and efficacious as well. He was requested to admonish one of them, and the next day, meeting the person on the street, after an earnest talk

about French literature, Longfellow said, "Ah! I was near forgetting. The Faculty voted last night that I should admonish you, and you will consider yourself admonished." At another time, when one of his pupils was audibly helped by another, he remarked, "Your recitation reminds me of the Spanish theatre, where the prompter performs a more important part than the actor."

Two years later Mr. Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, the second daughter of Judge Potter, of Portland, a lovely person, especially skilled in mathematics and languages. The marriage seemed to bring the young couple complete happiness. He began to write articles for the North American Review, on "The French Language," "The Poetry of Spain," "The Italian Language," and the like.

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His first book, a translation from the Spanish, of ninety pages, was published in 1833, two years after marriage, and "Outre-Mer" in 1834, sketches of travel, which Richard Henry Stoddard thinks more scholarly than the Sketch Book, and the style sweeter and mellower than obtains in that famous collection of papers." He wrote to a friend in Europe, "You see I am pushing on with vigor. There is nothing like writing when one is in the vein. The moment you stop, you grow cool; and then it is all over with you.”

But Mr. Longfellow desired a broader sphere, and one soon opened through the interest in him

of Ticknor, who was about to resign the Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard University. It was offered to Longfellow, who, after five and a half years at Bowdoin, accepted, and decided to spend eighteen months in Europe in study before entering upon his duties.

Taking his wife with him, they spent some months in Stockholm, where he studied Swedish, then Danish and Finnish, and later, in Holland, the Dutch language and literature.

With all this happiness and prospective honor, a deep shadow was close at hand. Mrs. Longfellow died at Rotterdam, November 29, 1835, saying with her latest breath, "I will be with you and watch over you."

That his grief was almost insupportable, we learn from "Hyperion," published four years later - a book so beautiful that Barry Cornwall used to say he read it once a year, for its style. "The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone. Shadows of evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection, itself a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. Then stars

arise, and the night is holy." Of Paul Flemming he says, "Death cut down the sweet blue flower that bloomed beside him, and wounded him with that sharp sickle, so that he bowed his

head, and would fain have been bound up in the same sheaf with the sweet blue flower."

To his father he wrote, "Every day makes me more conscious of the loss I have suffered in Mary's death; and when I think how gentle and affectionate and good she was every moment of her life, even to the last, and that she will be no more with me in this world, the sense of my bereavement is deep and unutterable."

Of her he wrote, three years later, his exquisite "Footsteps of Angels."