in Portland, such high schools being
then almost as rare as professorships of modern languages. He was also
librarian. He gave a course of lectures on French, Spanish, and Italian
literature, but there seems to have been no reference to German, which
had not then come forward into the place in American education which it
now occupies. As to literature, he wrote to his friend, George W.
Greene, "Since my return I have written one piece of poetry, but have
not published a line. You need not be alarmed on that score. I am all
prudence now, since I can form a more accurate judgment of the merit of
poetry. If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first." It was
actually nine years. For the "North American Review" he wrote in April,
1831, an essay on "The Origin and Progress of the French Language." He
afterwards sent similar papers to the same periodical upon the Italian
and Spanish languages and literatures, each of these containing also
original translations. Thus he entered on his career as a teacher, but
another change in life also awaited him.

{11 _Life_, i. 90, 91.}

{12 _Life_, i. 165.}

{13 Scudder's _Men and Letters_, 28, 29.}

{14 Locke, _Essay on the Human Understanding_, bk. ii. ch. 10, "Of
Retention."}

CHAPTER VI

MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRUNSWICK

It has been a source of regret to many that the memoirs of Longfellow,
even when prepared by his brother, have given, perhaps necessarily, so
little space to his early love and first marriage, facts which are apt
to be, for a poet, the turning-points in his career. We know that this
period in Lowell's life, for instance, brought what seemed almost a
transformation of his nature, making an earnest reformer and patriot of
a youth who had hitherto been little more than a brilliant and somewhat
reckless boy. In Longfellow's serener nature there was no room for a
change so marked, yet it is important to recognize that it brought with
it a revival of that poetic tendency which had singularly subsided for a
time after its early manifestation. He had written to his friend, George
W. Greene, on June 27, 1830, that he had long ceased to attach any value
to his early poems or even to think of them at all. Yet after about a
year of married life, he began (December 1, 1832) the introduction to
his Phi Beta Kappa poem, and during the following year published a
volume of poetical translations from the Spanish; thus imitating Bryant,
then in some ways his