It was the custom at that time in Portland to send children to the Academy very soon after leaving the primary school, and there I first met Henry Longfellow; but he was a large boy fitting for college, and I was a little one. I can therefore only give you the impression made (by his habits and bearing) upon the mind of a boisterous boy who had with him nothing in common. But I recollect perfectly the impression made upon myself and others by his deportment, and from these impressions draw the inferences I communicate. He was a very handsome boy, retiring without being reserved; there was no chill in his manners. There was a frankness about him that won you at once; he looked you square in the face. His eyes were full of expression, and it seemed as if you could look down into them as into a clear spring. There were many rough boys in the school, a great deal of horse-play and a good many rough-and-tumble games at recess, and the boys who were not inclined to engage in them often excited the ill-will of their ruder mates who were prone to imagine that the former felt above them. As a result the quiet boys sometimes fell victims to this feeling and were dragged out and rudely treated. But no one ever thought of taking such liberties with Longfellow, nor did such suspicions ever attach to him. Not even John Bartels or John Goddard ever meddled with him. I think John Goddard expressed the common sentiment of the school when, after some boy had remarked upon Longfellow’s retiring habits, he exclaimed: “Oh, let him alone. He don’t belong to our breed of cats.” He had no relish for rude sports, but he loved to bathe in a little creek on the border of Deering’s Oaks. And he would sometimes tramp through the woods with a gun; but this was mostly through the influence of others. He loved much better to lie under a tree and read. Small boys think it a great affair to tag after larger ones, especially if the larger ones carry guns, and I have often picked up the dead squirrels that he and others used to shoot in the oaks. And he and John Kinsman or Edward Preble would boost me into a tree to shake off acorns for them.
His early associations were very strong, and as is the fact in respect to most of us, they strengthened with age and cropped out everywhere in his verse. One familiar with the scenes and events of his youth can readily trace to their source the allusions in many of his verses. It was doubtless after gathering the mayflower on some half-holiday or tramping through the woods that, as he lay beneath some one of those old oaks on the verge of the forest, with limbs thirty feet in length within reach of the hand, and looked up through the branches and watched the clouds go by, he received those impressions which took form in the following lines:--