A Psalm of Life, Footsteps of Angels, The Reaper and the Flowers, five favorite college poems and some translations. 2. His striking ballads, The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hesperus, published two years later, in 1841, established his superiority as a story teller in verse. These ballads may well be compared to the minstrelsy of old in point of strength, simplicity and swiftness. 3. His Poems of Slavery written in 1842, while returning from Europe, added another poetic voice to the cause of freedom; but they did not equal the passionate power of Whittier's poems on the same subject. 4. Longfellow sought eminence in each of the great departments of verse.-lyric, epic and dramatic. In 1846, he published the Belfry of Bruges, which contained some of his finest lyrics, such as The Bridge, The Arrow and the Song, the Arsenal at Springfield, and the Old Clock on the Stairs. The first of these was a bit of his own experience. In his loneliness he used often to visit friends across the river, returning to his desolate home late at night. The power of Longfellow's artistic, beautiful lyrics has been proven by their extraordinary popularity. 5. Evangeline, "the flower of American idyls," was published in 1847. Concerning it, Longfellow wrote: "Some time before I wrote Evangeline, Hawthorne and Sumner were dining with me. After dinner, Hawthorne told us that he had lately become interested in the Acadian exiles. It excited his imagination. He fancied two lovers, widely separated and wandering for years, meeting only to die, and wished to make a novel of it. He, however, thought the subject too difficult, and fancied he would have to give it up. I waited awhile, heard nothing more about the novel, and finally asked Hawthorne if he were willing that I should make the story the subject of a poem. He consented, and was one of the first to congratulate me on its popularity." It was written in classical dactylic hexameter, and the bold experiment was much criticized as un-English. However, "the lingering melancholy, the grace and tenderness of this simple tale, wandering through scenes of primeval and pastoral beauty, exercise an irresistible charm upon readers of every class and condition." The poet soon after tried another experiment in the same hexameter, in the Courtship of Miles Standish. In this poem, we find a frolicsome humor which is quite unlike the poet, but which wonderfully softens our hard picture of the Plymouth colony. 6. Hiawatha, a forest epic, published in 1855, is more redolent of the primitive soil of America than anything else in our literature. Stedman says that it is the one poem that beguiles the reader to see birch and ash, the heron and eagle and deer, as they seem to the red man himself. "The form, borrowed from the 'Kalevala' of Finland, consists of the trochaic tetrameter verse, then almost unknown to English poetry, with parallelism, or the repetition of lines in slightly varied form." It was very strange and curious and the critics made much sport with the simple verses, but could not prevent their winning a complete triumph. Emerson wrote "It is sweet and wholesome as maize," and delighted readers everywhere agreed with him. 7. Outre-Mer, Longfellow's first prose work, was reminiscent of his travels, and written after Irving's style. Hyperion was a delightful romance of noble aspirations and sentiment. It is as much the companion of the traveled man of letters in Germany as is Hawthorne's Marble Faun in Italy. It first introduced German poetry to the New World. Kavanagh, issued soon after Evangeline, was a story of New England village life, and was pronounced by Hawthorne "a most precious and rare book, as fragrant as a bunch of flowers." The delicacy and elegance of his prose was, however, too fragile to survive, and the story served only as a key to some of his principles and ideas. 8. Longfellow made a great many translations, and no matter from what language he attempted to recut gems, the work was delicately and accurately done with. remarkable ease. His translation of the Divine Comedy by Dante is one of the best English versions, famous especially for its closeness to the original. 9. Longfellow, like Tennyson, desired to produce a dramatic masterpiece, but his genius was not strong enough for this. His nearest approach to a successful play was his early Spanish Student. The Golden Legend, the second part of his elaborate triology, Christus, was worthy of some admiration.. His other plays, Judas Maccabeus and Michael Angelo, were utter failures. 10. Longfellow's interesting Tales of a Wayside Inn, told by a group of friends around the blazing hearth of the quaint old Sudbury tavern, appeared in 1863. Chief among these tales were the well known favorites Paul Revere's Ride, Birds of Killingworth, and King Robert of Sicily. II. Longfellow fully realized the prayer of Horace which he repeated in his Ultima Thule that he might "pass an old age neither unworthy nor without song." To the last his poems sang sweetly, indeed there seemed to be an increasing depth and fullness of tone as age drew on. The Hanging of the Crane, a charming domestic idyl, was produced in his sixty-seventh year. The next year, he read his famous Morituri Salutamus to the survivors of his old college class. Keramos, the poem of the potter, issued four years later, was a truly fitting companion for his Building of the Ship. THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS. It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter, Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds That ope in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now west, now south. Then up and spake an old sailor, Had sailed to the Spanish Main,— "I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. "Last night the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!" 1 The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe, Colder and louder blew the wind, And the billows frothed like yeast. Down came the storm, and smote amain The vessel in its strength; She shuddered and paused, like a frightened steed, Then leaped her cable's length. "Come hither! come hither! my little daughter, And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow." He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. "O father! I hear the church bells ring, O say, what may it be?" "Tis a fog bell on a rock-bound coast!"And he steered for the open sea. "O father! I hear the sound of guns, O say, what it may be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!" "O father! I see a gleaming light, O say, what it may be?" |