Among the maturer books of Mary Potter was Worcester's "Elements of
History," then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a
little book called "The Literary Gem" (1827), which was an excellent
companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included
translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be
known, Goethe, Richter, and Koerner, together with examples of that
American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the
German, and of which the "Legend of Peter Rugg," by William Austin, is
the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it
will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for
her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry,
and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have
lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible
in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature.
It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training
assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's
early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in
Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as "a lovely woman in character and
appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner
that won all hearts."{15}

Longfellow's salary at Bowdoin College was eight hundred dollars, as
professor of modern languages, with an additional hundred as librarian.
From the beginning he took the lead among American teachers in this
department, the difficulty among these being that they consisted of two
classes,--Americans imperfectly acquainted with Europe and foreigners as
imperfectly known in America. Even in the selection of mere tutors the
same trouble always existed, though partially diminished, as time went
on, by those refugees from revolutionary excitements in Europe,
especially from Germany and Italy, who were a real addition to our
university circles. Even these were from their very conditions of
arrival a somewhat impetuous and unmanageable class, and in American
colleges--as later during the Civil War in the American army--the very
circumstances of their training made them sometimes hard to control as
subordinates. It was very fortunate, when they found, as in Longfellow,
a well-trained American who could be placed over their heads.

There were also text-books and readers to be prepared and edited by the
young pro