model, who had derived so much of his inspiration
from the Spanish muse. It is not unreasonable to recognize something of
his young wife's influence in this rekindling of poetic impulse, and it
is pleasant, in examining the manuscript lectures delivered by him at
Bowdoin College and still preserved there, to find them accompanied by
pages of extracts, here and there, in her handwriting. It will therefore
be interesting to make her acquaintance a little farther.

Mary Storer Potter was the second daughter of the Hon. Barrett Potter
and Anne (Storer) Potter of Portland, neighbors and friends of the
Longfellow family. She had been for a time a schoolmate of Henry
Longfellow at the private school of Bezaleel Cushman in Portland; and it
is the family tradition that on the young professor's returning to his
native city after his three years' absence in Europe he saw her at
church and was so struck with her appearance as to follow her home
afterwards without venturing to accost her. On reaching his own house,
however, he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter
residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel. They were married
September 14, 1831, she being then nineteen years of age, having been
born on May 12, 1812, and he being twenty-four.

It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of
its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring,
seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the
neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my
possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young
poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that
day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented
in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her
love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus
represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or
Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had
encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers
a calculation of an eclipse.

She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss
Gushing in Hingham. "My first impression of her," wrote in later years
the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,--who was professor of Latin
and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,--"is of an attractive
person, blooming in health