HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. BY HORACE E. SCUDDER PAGE iii Copyright, 1866, by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Copyright, 1879, A SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. I. a large, THE house is still standing in Portland, Maine, square, wooden house at the corner of Fore and Hancock streets, where Longfellow was born, February 27, 1807. Longfellow's early life, however, was passed in what is known as the Longfellow House, a substantial brick mansion in Congress Street. Here lived his father, Stephen Longfellow, and his mother, Zilpha (Wadsworth) Longfellow. The father was a lawyer, who gathered honors through a long life, having been several times a member of the Massachusetts Legislature while Maine was a district of that State; a member of the Hartford Convention, for he was a stout Federalist; a presidential elector when Monroe was first elected; and a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1823 to 1825. He died in 1849, after Evangeline had set its seal upon his son's growing reputation. The mother was daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, who had fought in the Revolutionary War. Both parents were descended from Englishmen, who came to this country in the early days of the colony, and whose successors were marked men in the generations that followed. Upon his mother's side the poet traced his ancestry to four of the Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower, two of these being Elder William Brewster and Captain John Alden. |