at Boston on the
way, where he dined with Professor George Ticknor, then holding the
professorship at Harvard College to which Longfellow was destined to
succeed at a later day. Professor Ticknor had himself recently returned
from a German university, and urged the young man to begin his studies
there, giving him letters of introduction to Professor Eichhorn, to
Robert Southey, and to Washington Irving, then in Europe.

He sailed on the ship Cadmus, Captain Allen, and wrote to his mother
from Havre that his passage of thirty days had been a dreary blank, and
that the voyage was very tiresome because of the continual talking of
French and broken English, adding, "For Frenchmen, you know, talk
incessantly, and we had at least a dozen of them with us." In spite of
this rather fatiguing opportunity, he was not at once at home in French,
but wrote ere long, "I am coming on famously, I assure you." He wrote
from Auteuil, where he soon went, "Attached to the house is an extensive
garden, full of fruit-trees, and bowers, and alcoves, where the boarders
ramble and talk from morning till night. This makes the situation an
excellent one for me; I can at any time hear French conversation,--for
the French are always talking. Besides, the conversation is the purest
of French, inasmuch as persons from the highest circles in Paris are
residing here,--amongst others, an old gentleman who was of the
household of Louis the Sixteenth, and a Madame de Sailly, daughter of a
celebrated advocate named Berryer, who was the defender of Marshal Ney
in his impeachment for treason. There is also a young student of law
here, who is my almost constant companion, and who corrects all my
mistakes in speaking or writing the French. As he is not much older than
I am, I do not feel so much embarrassed in speaking to him as I do in
speaking to others. These are some of the advantages which I enjoy here,
and you can easily imagine others which a country residence offers over
that of a city, during the vacation of the literary institutions at
Paris and the cessation of their lectures."

It is to be noticed from the outset that the French villages
disappointed him as they disappoint many others. In his letters he
recalls "how fresh and cheerful and breezy a New England village is; how
marked its features--so different from the town, so peculiar, so
delightful." He finds a French village, on the other hand, to be like a
deserted town, having "the same paved s