LONGFELLOW
1113
LONGFELLOW
library of Craigie House, and said: "He was a beautiful soul."
No more fitting epitaph could be inscribed on Longfellow's monument. He was a beautiful soul, and his poetry was a reflection of the goodness, sincerity and purity of his mind and heart. The man who was to win so unique a place in the affections of men was the natural product of an unspoiled New England. He was born in Portland, Maine, Feb. 27, 1807.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Settled in 1632, Portland still retained much of its Puritan character in the simplicity of living and democracy of society. No one was either very rich or very poor. Good morals and propriety were expected; superior education and manners inspired respect. Imagination was given wider range in this busy seaport town than in the interior by the arrival and departure of sailing vessels in the foreign trade. In My Lost Youth the poet shows how early in life these things exercised their fascination on him. Upon his graduation from Bowdoin College, Maine, at 18, the way to a literary life was opened by the offer of a professorship in modern languages at his Alma Mater. Three years' study in Europe, during which he mastered the French, Spanish and German languages and literatures, fitted him for the position which he assumed at 21. Choosing literature as a profession as early and as definitely as did Lowell, Longfellow was later in finding himself. His studies and travels had led him to revere the great writers of the past and of foreign lands — especially of Germany, on which the shadows of Goethe and Schiller still lay. In comparison with these he distrusted his own powers. So, until he was more than 30, he mainly wrote prose of a poetic, mystic character, that showed the German inspiration. This, however, established his reputation as a scholar, and won his appointment to the
chair of belles lettres at Harvard. In 1836, after another year abroad and the death of his young wife, he went to Cambridge. He secured a room in Craigie House which he afterwards bought, and this continued to be his home for 46 years. There he wrote Hyperion, which closed the first period of his literary life. This was in 1839. He had looked into the mind of Jean Paul Richter, when he wrote it, but although it was received with enthusiasm, he now took for his motto: " Look into thine own heart and write." Within a year he published a little volume of poems entitled Voices of the Night, which contained The Psalm of Life. Dumb, moral, prosaic New England, that cared more for virtue than for verse, had found a voice at last; one that was simple and musical and true, but that had an unknown charm and matchless art. The Ballads which followed contained The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith.
At the very height of his popularity Longfellow wrote his Poems on Slavery. The subject was bitterly discussed at the time, and the poet suffered by ranging himself on the side of the abolitionists. His muse was temporarily obscured. In 1842 he married again, bought Craigie House and became the center of a charming, cultivated circle in Cambridge. Here he shone at his best in his rare social gifts. In 1847 he published Evangeline, and re-won more than his old popularity at home, and became famous abroad for this "ten-derest idyll" in the English language, as it was called by a critic. With The Building of The Ship, published when the Union had begun to be threatened, he appealed to patriotism in a noble way that endeared him to the people. Before the Civil War broke out he had published The Golden Legend, Hiawatha and The Courtship of Miles Standish. Hiawatha was widely discussed and attacked, both as a poem and as to its faithfulness to Indian legends. Its meter, new to English verse, was taken from The Kalevala the epic of Finland and of a primitive people, which made it seem so genuine an expression of the red man. It proved the poet's wonderful versatility. He was yet to draw inspiration from the Old World in Tales of a Wayside Inn. Really at home in Europe, familiar with modern languages, foreign manners, customs and literatures, he enlarged the field of our vision, stimulated historic imagination and quickened our sympathies. Foreign travel had not then become easy or common, and the tide of immigration had not yet set in strongly; so we had no sense of fellowship with the people of Europe and little feeling of our own historic past in lands beyond the seas. Longfellow supplied that lack, and widened and enriched the intellectual horizon of his time.
