"
A scholar himself, he did not write for scholars, nor study for the
sole purpose of becoming a light to any university. It was the energy
of a soul looking for larger expansion; a spirit true to itself and
its own prompting, finding its way by labor and love to the free use
and development of the power within him. Of his early years some
anecdotes have been preserved in a private note-book which have not
appeared elsewhere; among them this bit of reminiscence from
Hawthorne, who said, in speaking of his own early life and the days at
Bowdoin College, where he and Longfellow were in the same class, that
no two young men could have been more unlike. Longfellow, he
explained, was a tremendous student, and always carefully dressed,
while he himself was extremely careless of his appearance, no student
at all, and entirely incapable at that period of appreciating
Longfellow.
The friendship between these two men ripened with the years.
Throughout Longfellow's published correspondence, delightful letters
are found to have been exchanged. The very contrast between the two
natures attracted them more and more to each other as time went on;
and among the later unpublished letters I find a little note from
Longfellow in which he says he has had a sad letter from Hawthorne,
and adds: "I wish we could have a little dinner for him, of two sad
authors and two jolly publishers, nobody else!"
As early as 1849, letters and visits were familiarly exchanged between
Fields and himself, and their friendship must have begun even earlier.
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