Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[143] practice now very general. I have told elsewhere how, when he undertook to address us in the evening in the college yard during what he called in his diary a “silly and boyish outbreak,” -called by the students a rebellion,--he was listened to when other professors had been silenced, and this under the cry: “We will hear Professor Longfellow. He always treats us like gentlemen.” He was indeed, undoubtedly, at this time, the best model of manners among all the professors, but it was sometimes felt that his courtesy had a little background of reserve, not easily surmounted. Young people demand not merely kindliness from their elders, but perhaps a little exuberance, and are sometimes as much checked by the absence of this secondary supply of cordiality as by coldness of first greeting. Professor Longfellow never was cold, but on the other hand he was never quite warm; and I sometimes thought that Professor Peirce, the mathematician, who rarely answered our greetings in the street, yet was all frankness if he happened to speak to us, was more thoroughly winning to juveniles than the uniformly courteous but more distant Longfellow.