lers, and win for him imperishable fame."

Longfellow learned to make what is _useful_, _agreeable_, and this
principle was one of the great secrets of his success in literary
life. His early poems that did useful and agreeable service in the
poet's corner of the newspapers of the time were, so far as we know,
never collected. A few of them, however, survive, among them "The
Spirit of Poetry," "Sunrise on the Hills," and "The Hymn of the
Moravian Nuns."

At the age of fourteen he was prepared for Bowdoin College, which he
entered a year later as a sophomore, and became a member of one of the
most distinguished classes in American history. Among his
fellow-students were Nathaniel Hawthorne, his personal friend, John S.
C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, William Pitt Fessenden, John P. Hale,
Calvin E. Stone, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the
United States. He was graduated the fourth in his class.

The ambition for authorship came to him among the shades of Bowdoin.
He said while there, thus anticipating in prose the "Psalm of Life:"
"Whatever I study I ought to engage in with all my soul, for I _will_
be eminent in something."

His poems published in the newspapers, principally in the _Boston
Literary Gazette_, during his college life made for him a name, and he
was offered the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College,
soon after his graduation. To better prepare himself for the chair he
went abroad, in 1826, in his twentieth year. He studied in France,
Spain, Italy, and Germany. He made himself master of the French,
Spanish, German, and Italian languages and literature, and returned to
America in the late summer of 1829, and entered upon the duties of his
professorship at Bowdoin in the autumn. He married Miss Mary Potter,
of Portland, Me., and went to live in an old house, which was shaded
by a single great elm, the site of which is still shown, on a salary
of $1,000 per year. He published "Outre Mer," and taught and wrote
with such distinguished success that, on the resignation of George
Ticknor, he was offered the chair of modern languages at Harvard. For
the larger preparation which he found necessary for his work, he went
to Europe again in 1835. In his first visit to Europe he had met
Washington Irving in Spain; he now made the acquaintance of Carlyle
and Browning. His wife died in Germany.

He became a professor in Harvard in the fall of 1836, making his
residence at the Cragie House, a