HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born on the 27th of February, 1807, Portland, Maine. His father, Stephen Longfellow, a graduate of Harvard College in the class with Dr. Channing, Judge Story, and other distinguished men, practised his profession of the Law at the Cumberland bar, where he soon won a prominent position. He also took an active part in politics, and was sent as a representative to the Massachusetts Legislature, and after the separation represented his State in Congress. He married Zilpah Wadsworth, the beautiful daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, of a family which traced its ancestry back to John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, Henry Wadsworth was named after his maternal uncle, a lieutenant in the navy, who had perished in the fireship Intrepid before Tripoli in 1804. He was second in a family of four sons and four daughters. Their father, says Samuel Longfellow, was at once kind and strict, bringing up his children in habits of respect and obedience, of unselfishness, the dread of debt, and the faithful performance of duty." According to the same authority, the mother was fond of poetry and music, a lover of Nature, cheerful even under the trials of chronic invalidism, full of piety, kind to her neighbors, the devoted friend and confidante of her children. 66 Henry was a lively, active boy, impetuous and quick-tempered, but affectionate and placable, sensitive and impressionable. He was fond of singing and dancing, but greatly disliked loud noise and excitement. He was remarkably neat and orderly, "solicitous always to do right," industrious and persevering. He began to go to school when he was three years old. Before he was seven he had studied halfway through the Latin grammar. One of his teachers at the Portland Academy was the famous Jacob Abbott. At home his father's library gave his hunger for literature sufficient of the best food: Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Goldsmith, the best poets, essayists, and historians, the "Arabian Nights," "Don Quixote," and Ossian. The first book to fascinate his imagination was Washington Irving's “Sketch Book." He was a schoolboy of twelve when the first number came out; and he long afterwards declared that he read it "with ever increasing wonder and delight, spellbound by its pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its atmosphere of revery, -nay, even by its gray-brown covers, the shaded letters of its titles, and the fair, clear type, which seemed an outward symbol of its style." |