ribed it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty
Years Ago_, originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and
afterward reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of
a university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one.
Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs,
its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner parties, etc.,
he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded
avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston State-house looming
distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue
sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh.
There was {476} thus, at all times during the quarter of a century
embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or
about Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and
exerting upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the
closer circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group
was loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration
Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members
were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Tellon, Professor of Greek at Harvard,
and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful
lecturer, essayist and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry
R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) the most widely read and loved
of American poets--or indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and
America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years was a
native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the
same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had
studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the
professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several
text books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and
literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical
translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various
periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European {477} travel
entitled _Outre Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance
in 1839 of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection
by Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New
England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and
variety th