LONGFELLOW 861
publication, an immense popularity, due mainly to its sentimental romanticism. At present few persons beyond their teens would care to read it through, so unnatural and stilted is its language, so thin its material, and so consciously mediated its sentiment. Nevertheless it has a certain historical importance, for two reasons – (1) because it marks that period in Longfellow's career when, though he had left nature, he had not yet found art, and (2) because it opened the sluices through which the flood of German sentimental poetry flowed into the United States – a flood whose waters, after forty years, are not yet assuaged. The Voices of the Night contains some of his best minor poems, e.g., "The Psalm of Life" and "Footsteps of Angels." In 1841 Longfellow published a small volume of Ballads and other Poems, containing some of his most popular pieces, e.g., "The Skeleton in Armour," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," "The Village Blacksmith," "To a Child," "The Bridge," "Excelsior." In 1842 he paid a third brief visit to Europe, spending the summer on the Rhine. During his return-passage across the Atlantic he wrote his Poems on Slavery, which he published the same year, with a dedication to Channing. These poems went far to wake in the youth of New England a sense of the great national wrong, and to prepare them for that bitter struggle in which it was wiped out at the expense of the lives of so many of them. In 1843 he married again, choosing this time Miss Frances E. Appleton of Boston, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, one of the founders of Lowell, and a sister of Thomas G. Appleton, himself no mean poet.
About the same time he bought, and fixed his residence in, the house in which he had formerly only been a lodger, an old "revolutionary house," built about the beginning of last century, and occupied by General Washington at the time when he took command of the United States army in 1776. This quaint old wooden house, which stands in the midst of a large garden full of splendid elms, continued to be his chief residence till the day of his death. Of the lectures on Dante which he delivered about this time, James Russell Lowell says: – "These lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full significance of the great Christian poet." Indeed, as a professor, Longfellow was eminently successful. Shortly after the Poems on Slavery, there appeared in 1843 a more ambitious work, The Spanish Student, a kind of sentimental "Morality," without any special merit but good intention. If published nowadays it would hardly attract notice; but in those gushing, emotion-craving times it had considerable popularity, and helped to increase the poet's now rapidly widening fame. A huge collection of translations of foreign poetry edited by him, and entitled The Poets of Europe, appeared in 1845, and, about the same time, a few minor poems – songs and sonnets – under the title The Belfry of Bruges. In 1847 he gave to the world the greatest of all his works, and the one which will carry his name down to posterity Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie. It was, in some degree, an imitation of Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, and its plot, which was derived from Hawthorne's American Note-Books, is even simpler than that of the German poem, not to say much more touching. At the violent removal by the British Government of a colony of French settlers from Acadie (Nova Scotia) in 1755, a young couple, on the very day of their wedding, got separated and carried in different directions, so that they lost all trace of each other. The poem describes the wanderings of the bride in search of her lover, and her final discovery of him as an old man on his death-bed, in a public hospital which she had entered as a nurse. Slight as the story is, it is worked out into one of the most affecting poems in the language, and gives to literature one of its most perfect types of womanhood and of "affection that hopes and endures and is patient." Though written in a metre deemed foreign to English ears, the poem immediately attained a wide popularity, which it has never lost, and secured to the dactylic hexameter a recognized place among English metres.
In 1849 Longfellow published a novel of no great merit, Kavanagh, and also a volume of poems entitled The Seaside and the Fireside, a title which has reference to his two homes, the seaside one on the charming peninsula of Nahant, the fireside one in Cambridge. One of the poems in this collection, "Resignation," has taken a permanent place in literature; another,"Hymn for my Brother's Ordination," shows plainly the nature of the poet's Christianity. His brother, the Rev. Samuel Longfellow, is a minister of the Unitarian Church.
Longfellow's genius, in its choice of subjects, always oscillated between America and Europe, between the colonial period of American history and the Middle and Romantic Ages of European feeling. When tired of the broad daylight of American activity, he sought refuge and rest in the dim twilight of mediæval legend and German sentiment. In 1851 appeared The Golden Legend, a long lyric drama based upon Hartmann von Aue's beautiful story of self-sacrifice, Der arme Heinrich. Next to Evangeline, this is at once the best and the most popular of the poet's longer works, and contains many passages of great beauty. Bringing his imagination back to America, he next applied himself to the elaboration of an Indian legend. In 1854 he resigned his professorship. In the following year he gave to the world the Indian Edda, The Song of Hiawatha, a conscious imitation, both in subject and metre, of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, with which he had become acquainted during his second visit to Europe. The metre is monotonous and easily ridiculed, but it suits the subject, and the poem is very popular. In 1858 appeared The Courtship of Miles Standish, based on a charming incident in the early history of the Plymouth colony, and, along with it, a number of minor poems, included under the modest title, Birds of Passage. One of these is "My Lost Youth."
Two events now occurred which served to cast a gloom over the poet's life and to interrupt his activity, – the outbreak of the civil war, and the tragic fate of his wife, who, having accidentally allowed her dress to catch fire, was burnt to death in her own house in 1861. It was long before he recovered from the shock caused by this terrible event, and in his subsequent published poems he never ventured even to allude to it. When he did in some measure find himself again, he gave to the world his charming Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), and then a "second flight" of his Birds of Passage. Among the latter is a poem entitled "The Children's Hour," which affords a glance into the home life of the widowed poet, who had been left with five children – two sons, Ernest and Charles, and three daughters,
"Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair."
The Birds of Passage was succeeded by a small volume entitled Flower de Luce (1866), which contains, among other fine things, the beautiful "threnos" on the burial of Hawthorne, and "The Bells of Lynn." Once more the poet sought refuge in mediæval life by completing his translation of the Divina Commedia, parts of which he had rendered into English as much as thirty years before. This work appeared in 1867, and gave a great impulse to the study of Dante in America. It is a masterpiece of literal translation. Next came the New England Tragedies (1868), and The Divine Tragedy (1871), which found no large
