in my department;
always to me a day of anguish and exhaustion." His correspondence is
very large; visitors and dinner parties constantly increase. His mother
dies suddenly, and he sits all night alone by her dead body; a sense of
peace comes over him, as if there had been no shock or jar in nature,
but a "harmonious close to a long life." Later he gets tired of summer
rest at Nahant, which he calls "building up life with solid blocks of
idleness;" but when two days later he goes back to Cambridge to resume
his duties, he records: "I felt my neck bow and the pressure of the
yoke." Soon after he says: "I find no time to write. I find more and
more the little things of life shut out the great. Innumerable
interruptions--letters of application for this and for that; endless
importunities of foreigners for help here and help there--fret the day
and consume it." He often records having half a dozen men to dine with
him; he goes to the theatre, to lectures, concerts, and balls, has no
repose, and perhaps, as we have seen at Nahant, would not really enjoy
it. It was under these conditions, however, that the "Golden Legend"
came into the world in November, 1851; and it was not until September
12, 1854, that its author was finally separated from the University. He
was before that date happily at work on "Hiawatha."

{71 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xiii. 363.}

{72 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xiii. 13.}

{73 _Harvard College Papers_ [MSS.], 2d ser. xiv. 61.}

CHAPTER XVI

LITERARY LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE

Let us now return from the history of Longfellow's academic life to his
normal pursuit, literature. It seemed a curious transition from the real
and genuine sympathy for human wrong, as shown in the "Poems on
Slavery," to the purely literary and historic quality of the "Spanish
Student" (1843), a play never quite dramatic enough to be put on the
stage, at least in English, though a German version was performed at the
Ducal Court Theatre in Dessau, January 28, 1855. As literary work it was
certainly well done; though taken in part from the tale of Cervantes "La
Gitanilla," and handled before by Montalvan and by Solis in Spanish, and
by Middleton in English, it yet was essentially Longfellow's own in
treatment, though perhaps rather marred by taking inappropriately the
motto from Robert Burns. He wrote of it to Samuel Ward in New York,
December, 1840, calling it "something still longer which as ye