Politics & Power Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A scholar who studies alone doesn’t stay pure; he shrinks. Longfellow frames intellectual growth less as hoarding knowledge than as a social act, a kind of disciplined contamination. The key phrase is “large and liberal”: not liberal as a party label, but as a temperament roomy enough to hold contradictions, to revise itself without collapsing into relativism or pride. He’s warning that the scholar’s real enemy isn’t ignorance so much as the claustrophobia of a sealed mind.

The verb choice matters. The mind “should come in contact,” like a chemical reaction or an electrical circuit. Contact implies friction and risk: other minds don’t simply affirm you; they push back, expose blind spots, force better arguments. The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about genius. For a 19th-century poet often associated with comforting lyricism, this is a tough-minded line: solitary brilliance is less important than the capacity to be changed by conversation, reading, debate, translation, travel - all the ways a mind gets interrupted.

Context sharpens it. Longfellow lived in a period when American letters were trying to professionalize and to prove themselves against European culture. He was also a professor and translator, someone whose “other minds” were literally foreign voices carried across languages. The quote reads like an argument for cosmopolitan education: if the scholar wants to stay “liberal,” he must keep meeting difference - not as a slogan, but as an ongoing practice that protects thought from turning into doctrine.