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My first impression of her, wrote in later years the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,--who was professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,--
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Some books from her girlish library now lie before me, dingy and time-worn, with her name in varying handwriting from the early
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Mary S. Potter to the later
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Mary S. P. Longfellow. They show many marked passages and here and there a quotation. The collection begins with Miss Edgeworth's
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Harry and Lucy; then follow somewhat abruptly
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Sabbath Recreations, by Miss Emily Taylor, and
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The Wreath, a selection of elegant poems from the best authors, --these poems including the classics of that day, Beattie's
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Minstrel, Blair's
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Grave, Gray's
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Elegy, Goldsmith's
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Traveller, and some lighter measures from Campbell, Moore, and Burns. The sombre muse undoubtedly predominated, but on the whole the book was not so bad an elementary preparation for the training of a poet's wife. It is a touching accidental coincidence that one of the poems most emphatically marked is one of the few American poems in these volumes, Bryant's
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Death of the Flowers, especially the last verse, which describes a woman who died in her youthful beauty. To these are added books of maturer counsel, as Miss Bowdler's
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Poems and Essays, then reprinted from the sixteenth English edition, but now forgotten, and Mrs. Barbauld's
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Legacy for Young Ladies, discussing beauty, fashion, botany, the uses of history, and especially including a somewhat elaborate essay on
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on which, perhaps, Judge Potter founded his prohibition of the classics. Mrs. Barbauld lays down the rule that
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she adds,
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she thinks,
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But she afterwards says,
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French you are not only permitted to learn, but you are laid under the same necessity of acquiring it as your brother is of acquiring the Latin. Mrs. Barbauld's demands, however, are not extravagant, as she thinks that
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This
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Elements of History, then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a little book called
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The Literary Gem (1827), which was an excellent companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be known, Goethe, Richter, and Körner, together with examples of that American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the German, and of which the
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Legend of Peter Rugg, by William Austin, is the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry, and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature. It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as