mong his note-books
of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears
many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to
the children of Cambridge, in 1880: "Thus the ideas as well as the
children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us
those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and
marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery
moulders away."{14} He also included a quotation from John Lyly's
"Endymion," which ten years later furnished the opening of his own
"Hyperion." "Dost thou know what a poet is? Why, fool, a poet is as much
as one should say--a poet." When we consider what he had just before
written to his sister, it only furnishes another illustration of the
fact, which needs no demonstration, that young authors do not always
know themselves.

He reached home from Europe, after three years of absence, on August 11,
1829, looking toward Bowdoin College as his abode, and a professorship
of modern languages as his future position. Up to this time, to be sure,
the economical college had offered him only an instructorship. But he
had shown at this point that quiet decision and firmness which marked
him in all practical affairs, and which was not always quite approved by
his more anxious father. In this case he carried his point, and he
received on the 6th of September this simple record of proceedings from
the college:--

"In the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College, Sept. 1st, 1829: Mr. Henry
W. Longfellow having declined to accept the office of instructor in
modern languages.

"Voted, that we now proceed to the choice of a professor of modern
languages.

"And Mr. H. W. Longfellow was chosen."

Thus briefly was the matter settled, and he was launched upon his life's
career at the age of twenty-two. Of those who made up his circle of
friends in later years, Holmes had just graduated from Harvard, Sumner
was a Senior there, and Lowell was a schoolboy in Cambridge. Few
American colleges had at that time special professors of modern
languages, though George Ticknor had set a standard for them all.
Longfellow had to prepare his own text-books--to translate "L'Homond's
Grammar," to edit an excellent little volume of French "Proverbes
Dramatiques," and a small Spanish Reader, "Novelas Espanolas." He was
also enlisted in a few matters outside, and drew up the outline of a
prospectus for a girls' high school