Henry Longfellow was growing into an attractive young man, with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. He was shy and gentle. His teachers liked him because he studied so carefully. His classmates liked him, too. But Henry’s shyness kept him from making a great number of friends.

In the same class at Bowdoin was another shy young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He and Henry didn’t become friends until years later.

Henry Longfellow was still in the Maine woods even though he was away at college. He liked to take long walks among the tall pine trees and think about the Indians that once wandered there. He was reading books about the Indians in college, books that told how they had lived and dressed and thought. He was beginning to understand them as people.

"I am learning to understand this persecuted race,” he wrote home to his mother. "American Indians really have many beautiful customs and ideas and have been very badly treated by white people.”

Many careful letters went home to his father and mother telling them exactly what he was doing. Henry wrote to his father about his lessons, his grades, his teachers, his friends. But his father was strict and formal, a stern lawyer; Henry couldn’t tell him everything.

When he wrote to his mother, he could write about the things that mattered most – his reading, his poetry. He was writing more and more poetry and sometimes he sent his poems home to his mother.