HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1 657 656 1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW Longfellow “My poor Aylmer!" murmured she. Longfellow purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips, when she recognised how barely perceptible was now that Crimson Hand, which had once blazed forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer's face, with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no means account for. "Poor? Nay, richest! Happiest! Most favored!" exclaimed he. "My peerless bride, it is successful! You are perfect!" "You have aimed loftily!—you have done nobly! Do not repent, that, with so "My poor Aylmer!" she repeated, with a more than human tenderness. high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best that earth could offer. Aylmer-dearest Aylmer-I am dying!" Alas, it was too true! The fatal Hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birth-mark—that sole token of human imperfection-faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight. Then a chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the gross Fatality of Earth exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this dim sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness, which would have woven his mortal life of the self-same texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and living once for all in Eternity, to find the perfect Future in the present. 1843, 1846 years Potter; four hoarse, was born in Portland, Maine (then still a part of Massachusetts), on February 27, 1807, the second of eight children. Both of his parents encouraged his early interest in reading and writing, but when he was sent to Bowdoin College in become a lawyer like his father. Graduating at age eighteen in the class of 1825, 1821, the expectation was that the fourteen-year-old Longfellow would eventually which also included Nathaniel Hawthorne and the future president Franklin Pierce, Longfellow made the risky vocational decision to pursue his interest in literature. He was aided in this ambition by a college trustee who donated money to Bowdoin to hire as a professor of modern languages, provided that Longfellow agreed to use his own funds to study languages in Europe. Supported by his father, Longfellow spent three years abroad, traveling in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain (where he met Washington Irving, the American writer he most admired). Returning to the United States in 1829 with a new fluency in four languages, the twenty-two-year-old Longfellow assumed the professorship at Bowdoin. In 1831 he married Mary Storer later he was appointed the Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard University, with the understanding that he would need to improve his skills in Germanic languages . To that end, he traveled to Europe with his wife in 1835; while in Holland, Mary died of complications from a miscarriage, Just before returning to the United States in 1836, Longfellow toured Switzerland and Austria, meeting and falling in love with Fanny Appleton, the daughter of the wealthy Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton. After a seven-year courtship, they married in 1843. As a wedding gift, Longfellow's father-in-law bought the couple Craigie House in Cambridge, a mansion abutting Harvard Yard where Longfellow himself had been renting rooms. Longfellow's first published poem appeared in Maine's Portland Gazette on Novem- ber 17, 1820, when he was thirteen years old. He published poems and prose while in college, but in his initial years as a professor he focused on publishing scholarly arti- cles in the North American Review, along with language textbooks and translations of European poetry. But he soon returned to his principal interest, which was writing his own poetry, publishing his first volume, Voices of the Night, in 1839. Other poetic volumes quickly followed, including Ballads and Other Poems (1841), Poems on Slavery (1842), and The Belfrey of Bruges and Other Poems (1846). Longfellow's great com- mercial breakthrough came with the publication of his 1847 narrative poem Evangeline, which went through six printings in nine weeks. Evangeline weaves a tragic love story into a poetic narrative of the British dispossession of an Acadian French settlement in Nova Scotia during the French and Indian War (1756-63). At a time of increasing inodernization, Longfellow tapped into the cultural nostalgia for times past that would also come to inform his popular Indian poetic narrative, Hiawatha. During these years Longfellow also published short and long prose pieces. Inspired by Irving's Sketch-Book, he brought out a collection of travel sketches, Outre-Mer, in 1835. In 1839 he published a two-volume prose romance, Hyperion; another prose romance, Kavanagh, appeared in 1849.00 27 As a poet and a teacher, Longfellow took pride in his cosmopolitanism and trans- atlanticism. Rejecting the call by American literary nationalists for writing that drew mainly on native sources, Longfellow in his poetry worked with a wide range of sources Homer and Virgil , for instance, for the hexameters of Evangeline, and Finnish mythologies and folk meter for Hiawatha. At Harvard, he taught European literatures of many periods and nationalities; he also published The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845; rev. ed. 1871), a book of translations for the general reading > HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOWS 1807-1882 public. enry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most beloved American poet of the nine- teenth century. His narrative poems Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) went through numerous editions , and his collections of lyrics—The Seaside and the Fireside (1850), Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), and many others—were also enormously popular . In Great Britain, Long Longfellow's death in 1882, he became the first American-born poet enshrined in fellow outsold England's poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and shortly after twentieth century, Longfellow came to be seen as an unadventurous, timid poet; but such an assessment unfairly diminishes the achievement of a writer who saw value in tion to his own culture and his own poetic aspirations, Longfellow exhibited a metri- working with (rather than against) established forms and traditions. Viewed in rela- and a melancholy outlook for which his soothing words were especially appropriate, cal complexity, a mastery of sound and atmosphere, a progressive social conscience, as though the poet were comforting himself as well as his audience. In 1854, Longfellow resigned from Harvard to devote himself completely to writ- ing, editing, and translating. When he published Hiawatha one year after his resigna- tion, the excellent sales (around thirty thousand copies in the first six months of publication) earned him his annual Harvard salary ($1,800) many times over. His 1858 The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems sold twenty-five thousand copies in the United States over the first two months of publication, and ten thousand copies in London on its first day of publication. By the 1870s Longfellow's annual THE SLAVE'S DREAM 1 659 658 1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW IV income from his writing was around $15,000, an enormous sum at that time and over melting wax to pre Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. 15 V As with his first marriage, tragedy struck unexpectedly. In 1861 Fanny Longfel- serve locks of her daughters' hair. Longfellow himself nearly died when he tried to low burned to death when her dress caught fire while she was of Dante, making the labor the occasion for regular meetings with friends such a smother the flames. In his grief Longfellow turned to translating the Divine Comedy James Russell Lowell and the young William Dean Howells; the volumes were pub- lished between 1865 and 1871. Longfellow made one last visit to Europe in 1868-69, during which Queen Victoria gave him a private audience and Oxford awarded him an honorary doctoral degree. On his return, he continued with his various writing and editing projects. His long religious poem Christus: A Mystery, the labor of many next decade, including a thirty-one-volume anthology, Poems of Place (1877-79). years, was published in 1872, and a number of other poetic volumes followed over the Longfellow died a month after his seventy-fifth birthday on March 24, 1882. At the In the world's broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! 20 VI ment was published posthumously in 1883. One year later his bust was unveiled time he was working on a long poem abert Driebelangele Michael Angelo: A Free Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act-act in the glorious Present! Heart within, and God o'er head! Poets' Corner VII A Psalm of Life 25 'Life that shall send A challenge to its end, And when it comes, say, 'Welcome, friend. 2 Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us The Footsteps on the sands of time. VIII What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist I 30 Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Footsteps, that, perhaps another, Blue Sailing o'er life's solemn main, bhA forlorn and shipwreck'd brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. IX II Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, both Learn to labor and to wait. quod Life is real-life is earnest- And the grave is not its goal: Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. 35 TO szett 1838, 1839 III The Slave's Dream 10 balo Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destin'd end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day. Beside the ungathered rice he lay, His sickle in his hand; 1. From the first printing, in Poems on Slavery (1842), a little volume that marked the high point of Longfellow's public concern over slavery in the United States. Longfellow's contemporaries reacted variously. Whittier thought the poems had been "of important service" to the cause of abolitionism, while a more objective observer found them "perfect dish water compared with Whittier's own poems against slavery. The major ity, North and South, deplored the publication of 2. Adapted from "Wishes to His Supposed Mis- tress" by the English poet Richard Crashaw (c. 1613-1649), 3. Meters, rhythms. 1. The text is that of the first publication, in the Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine (September 1838). The poem was collected in Voices of the Night (1839). the poems. 660 1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT 1 661 His breast was bare, his matted hair Was buried in the sand. Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep, He saw his Native Land. And his lifeless body lay A worn-out fetter, that the soul Had broken and thrown away! 5 1842 Wide through the landscape of his dreams The lordly Niger flowed; Beneath the palm-trees on the plain Once more a king he strode; And heard the tinkling caravans Descend the mountain-road. The Jewish Cemetery at Newport 10 How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves. Close by the street of this fair sea-port town; Silent beside the never-silent At rest in all this moving up and down! waves, 15 5 The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath such leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. 20 He saw once more his dark-eyed queen Among her children stand; They clasped his neck, they kissed his cheeks, They held him by the hand! A tear burst from the sleeper's lids And fell into the sand. 5online And then at furious speed he rode Along the Niger's bank; His bridle-reins were golden chains, And, with a martial clank, og 10 vi At each leap he could feel his scabbard of steel Smiting his stallion's flank. Ebba taldo Before him, like a blood-red flag, The bright flamingoes flew; From morn till night he followed their flight, O'er plains where the tamarind grew, Till he saw the roofs of Caffre huts, And the ocean rose to view. And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags? their burial-place, o ne bi Are like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.3 10 ondary The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Riverainterchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times. 25 SO 15 30 "Blessed be God! for he created Death!" The mourners said: "and Death is rest and peace." Then added, in the certainty of faith: “And giveth Life, that never more shall cease.” 20 At night he heard the lion roar, And the hyena scream, And the river-horse, as he crushed the reeds Beside some hidden stream; And it passed, like a glorious roll of drums, Through the triumph of his dream. 35 Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Ona bir Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected, for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. 25 40 The forests, with their myriad tongues, Shouted of liberty; And the Blast of the Desert cried aloud, With a voice so wild and free, That he started in his sleep and smiled At their tempestuous glee. sds shead He did not feel the driver's whip, alle il Nor the burning heat of day; For Death had illumined the Land of Sleep, my soul adi 45 1. First published in Putnam's Monthly (July 1854), the source of the present text. The first Jewish settlers arrived in Newport , Rhode Island, in 1658, encouraged by the relatively tolerant reli- gious attitudes of local leaders. During the colo- nial period, Newport had the second largest Jewish community in North America. The Touro Synagogue, the oldest still standing in the United States, dates from 1763. Longfellow visited New- I wanted port's Jewish Cemetery in July 1852. 2. Flagstones. 3. "Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tab- lets out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount" (Exodus 32.19). 4. The Newport Jews were Sephardims, immi- grants from Spain and Portugal, where they had acquired local names. 5. The Ten Commandments. 2. Great African river. 3. Kaffir, used here to wolle Africans. 4. Hippopotamus. mean non-Muslim togel 662 1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 663 My Lost Youth How came they here? What burst of Christian hate; What persecution, merciless, and blind, Drove o'er the sea,—that desert, desolate These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? 30 They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto or Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire. Often I think of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."2 35 5 All their lives long, with the unleavened bread And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed, And slaked its thirst with marahº of their tears. 40 10 Anathema maranatha!' was the cry That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai? Was mocked, and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, And catch, in sudden gleams, The sheen of the far-surrounding seas, And islands that were the Hesperides? Of all my boyish dreams. . And the burden of that old song, It murmurs and whispers still: “A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 15 45 Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them through the world, where'er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent. avon 20 For in the back-ground, figures vague and vast, Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time. BENEVA 50 I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tides tossing free; And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea. And the voice of that wayward song Is singing and saying still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 25 And thus for ever with reverted look, The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward like a Hebrew book,3 Till Life became a Legend of the Dead. Gabon 55 30 But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, and the dead nations never rise again. TEST 1854 I remember the bulwarks by the shore, And the fort upon the hill; The sun-rise gun, with its hollow roar, The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er, And the bugle wild and shrill. And the music of that old song Throbs in my memory still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 60 35 ിർ I remember the sea-fight far away, How it thundered o'er the tide! And the dead captains, as they lay 6. Outcasts. From Genesis 21, where Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, and their son, Ishmael, are driven from his household at the instigation of his wife, Sarah, after the birth of their son, Isaac. 7. Street of the Jews (German). "Ghetto": a sec- tion of a city to which Jews were restricted. 8. Foods eaten at Passover in remembrance of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. 9. Bitter water; see Exodus 15.22-25, which describes how the Hebrews, after crossing the Red Sea, came to Marah, where they found the water too bitter to drink until God showed Moses how to sweeten it with a tree. 1. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" (1 Corinthians 16.22). 2. A Jewish leader abused by the Persians (Esther 2.5-6). 3. Hebrew is read from right to left. 1. Longfellow wrote this poem about his home- town of Portland, Maine, in March 1855, at Cam- bridge. The text is that of the first printing in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (August 1855). It was reprinted in The Courtship of Miles Standish and 2. Longfellow derived the refrain from lines in the English writer John Scheffer's The History of Lapland (1674): "A Youth's desire is the desire of Other Poems (1858). the wind." Lapland is the area of northern Europe populated by the Finnic people of northern Nor- way, Sweden, Finland, and other nearby regions. 3. In Greek mythology, islands where the golden apples grew. 4. The American Enterprise and the British Boxer fought near Portland in 1813. Both captains were killed and carried ashore for burial. 664 1 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 40 I 665 Solos 18 I find my lost youth again. gribut And the strange and beautiful song, w gols The groves are repeating it still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, oubs And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." Voor bib 1855 amor doislynge 2010 vidson 90 45 In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay, Where they in battle died. And the sound of that mournful song Goes through me with a thrill: lo Indiano "A boy's will is the wind's will, a list And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."O menolari I can see the breezy dome of groves, or you bra The shadows of Deering's Woods;5 sbm And the friendships old and the early loves Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves od A In quiet neighborhoods.ruoda odobra And the verse of that sweet old song, It flutters and murmurs still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, 133 mA And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." !! bol (len) bolo lupo e badeildum vdowno on" ti gamtos bu baie bowbaarheid lacoger 50 books JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER Voima 1807-1892 Sigrignstub aid stiges balt vilse 0281 ounillow reistid gnitibo ban malinoidilods no lead Once -gol lol au mom quo grind 55 60 I remember the gleams and glooms that dart le lo Across the schoolboy's brain; The song and the silence in the heart, , That in part are prophecies, and in partevod A Are longings wild and vain. And the voice of that fitful song Sings on, and is never still: od T "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." A be There are things of which I may not speak; dan There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye. . And the words of that fatal song Come over me like a chill: dinara "A boy's will is the wind's will, bred And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." T 65 70 buique dabra ohn Greenleaf Whittier was born to a Quaker family on December 17, 1807, on a farm near Haverhill, Massachusetts. Although no longer persecuted in New England, Quakers were still a people apart, and Whittier grew up with a sense of being different from most of his neighbors. Labor on the debt-ridden farm over- strained his health in adolescence, and thereafter throughout his long life he suf- fered from intermittent physical collapses. At fourteen, having had only a meager education in a household suspicious of non-Quaker literature, he found in the Scot- tish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) an initial source of inspiration. Like Burns, Whittier began writing poems that employed regional dialect, dealt with homely subjects, and displayed a democratic social conscience. His first poem was pub- lished in 1826 in a local newspaper run by another young man, William Lloyd Gar- rison (1805-1879), whose dedication to the antislavery movement was to affect Whittier's life profoundly. In 1827 Garrison helped persuade Whittier's father that the young poet deserved a formal education, and Whittier supported himself through two terms at Haverhill Academy. In 1836, six years after his father's death, Whittier and his mother and sisters moved from the farm to a house in nearby Amesbury, Massachusetts, which he owned until his death. od be In his twenties Whittier became editor of various newspapers, some of regional importance. The turning point of his career came in 1833, when Garrison brought him into the abolitionist movement. In June 1833 Whittier published an antislavery pamphlet, Justice and Expediency, and later that year he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the tradition of such antislavery Quakers as Anthony Bene- zet (1713–1784) and John Woolman (1720-1793), Whittier believed that there was only one practicable and just scheme of emancipation: “Immediate abolition of slav- ery; an immediate acknowledgment of the great truth, that man cannot hold property in man; an immediate surrender of baneful prejudice to Christian love; an immediate practical obedience to the command of Jesus Christ: Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do even so to them?” Justice and Expediency). In an effort to disseminate his views to the widest possible audience, Whittier published over a hun- dred antislavery poems and quickly emerged as the most popular poet of the aboli- tionist movement . His antislavery poetry was collected in 1837 in an unauthorized volume, Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States , funded by abolitionists ; one year later he oversaw the publication of Poems (1838), which included most of his antislavery poetry up to that time. That same Year Whittier, in disguise, joined an antiabolitionist mob to save some of his papers as his office was being ransacked and burned. From the 1830s through the 1850s, Whittier was a working editor and writer asso- ciated with abolitionist newspapers such as the Washington, D.C., weekly National 75 Strange to me now are the forms I meet donker When I visit the dear old town; But the native air is pure and sweet, And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street, As they balance up and down, autor de bra Are singing the beautiful song, Are sighing and whispering still: todmoral "A boy's will is the wind's will, bebrush woh And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” 80 be And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair, And with joy that is almost pain My heart goes back to wander there, And among the dreams of the days that were, 85 5. Wooded area in Portland now called Deering Oaks.
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