Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[18] with him, but perhaps it was on account of the younger brother's youth—he being only fourteen—that the boys remained a year longer at home, and did not go to Brunswick until the beginning of the Sophomore year. Henry's college life was studious and modest. He and Nathaniel Hawthorne were classmates, having been friends rather than intimates, and Hawthorne gives in his ‘Fanshawe’ a tolerably graphic picture of the little rural college. Neither of the two youths cared much for field sports, but both of them were greatly given to miscellaneous reading; and both of them also spent a good deal of time in the woods of Brunswick, which were, and still are, beautiful. Longfellow pursued the appointed studies, read poetry, was fond of Irving, and also of books about the Indians, an experience which in later life yielded him advantage.

It is just possible that these books may have revived in him a regret expressed in one of his early college letters that he had not gone to West Point instead of Bowdoin,—some opportunity of appointment to the military school, perhaps through his uncle, General Wadsworth, having possibly been declined in his behalf.¹ It is curious indeed to reflect that had he made this