a beautiful pocket edition of Sir William
Jones's Letters, and have just finished reading them. Eight languages he
was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary; and
there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. I have somewhere seen
or heard the observation that as many languages as a person acquires, so
many times is he a man."{10}

It was undoubtedly an important fact to the young poet to be brought
thus early in contact with Sir William Jones and his twenty-eight
languages. It is the experience of all that the gift of learning a
variety of tongues is something which peculiarly belongs to youth. In
Southern Europe, in Russia, in the East, it is a common thing to
encounter mere children who with next to no schooling will prattle
readily in three or four languages with equal inaccuracy but with equal
ease; while a much older person may acquire them by laborious study and
yet never feel at home. One can hardly doubt Longfellow's natural
readiness in that direction; he was always being complimented, at any
rate--though this may not count for much--upon his aptness in
pronouncing foreign tongues, and the ease with which his own
compositions lent themselves to translation may very possibly have some
obscure connection with his own gifts in this respect. His college
training can have had little bearing upon it, since there is no evidence
that his classmate Hawthorne, doubtless a man of higher genius, showed
any such capacity.

{9 _Life_, i. 50.}

{10 _Life_, i. 57, 58.}

CHAPTER V

FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE

Longfellow's college class (1825) numbered thirty-seven, and his rank in
it at graduation was nominally fourth--though actually third, through
the sudden death of a classmate just before Commencement. Soon after his
graduation, an opportunity occurred to establish a professorship of
modern languages in the college upon a fund given by Mrs. Bowdoin; and
he, being then scarcely nineteen, and nominally a law student in his
father's office, was sent to Europe to prepare himself for this chair,
apparently on an allowance of six hundred dollars a year. The college
tradition is that this appointment--which undoubtedly determined the
literary tendencies of his whole life--was given to him in consequence
of the impression made upon an examining committee by the manner in
which he had translated one of Horace's odes. He accordingly sailed from
New York for Europe on May 15, 1826, having stopped