The mystery is our mystery,
perceived, and not created, by that finely endowed mind and
heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft
radiance of truth and beauty, are his own.
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.
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