ed whether Longfellow would accept a nomination to Congress
from the Liberty Party, and had added, "Our friends think they could
throw for thee one thousand more votes than for any other man."{65} Nor
was Whittier himself ever a disunionist, even on anti-slavery grounds.

It is interesting to note that it was apparently the anti-slavery
question which laid the foundation for the intimacy between Longfellow
and Lowell. Lowell had been invited, on the publication of "A Year's
Life," to write for an annual which was to appear in Boston and to be
edited, in Lowell's own phrase, "by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard and that
set."{66} Lowell subsequently wrote in the "Pioneer" kindly notices of
Longfellow's "Poems on Slavery," but there is no immediate evidence of
any personal relations between them at that time. In a letter to Poe,
dated at Elmwood June 27, 1844, Lowell says of a recent article in the
"Foreign Quarterly Review" attributed to John Forster, "Forster is a
friend of some of the Longfellow clique here, which perhaps accounts for
his putting L. at the top of our Parnassus. These kinds of arrangements
do very well, however, for the present."{67}... It will be noticed that
what Lowell had originally called a "set" has now become a "clique." It
is also evident that lie did not regard Longfellow as the assured head
of the American Parnassus, and at any rate he suggests some possible
rearrangement for the future. Their real friendship seems to have begun
with a visit by Longfellow to Lowell's study on October 29, 1846, when
the conversation turned chiefly on the slavery question. Longfellow
called to see him again on the publication of his second volume of
poems, at the end of the following year, and Lowell spent an evening
with Longfellow during March, 1848, while engaged on "The Fable for
Critics," in which the younger poet praised the elder so warmly.

Longfellow's own state of mind at this period is well summed up in the
following letter to his wife's younger sister, Mrs. Peter Thacher, then
recently a mother.

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 15, 1843.

MY DEAR MARGARET,--I was very much gratified by your brief epistle,
which reached me night before last, and brought me the assurances of
your kind remembrance. Believe me, I have often thought of you and
your husband; and have felt that your new home, though remote from
many of your earlier friends, was nevertheless