HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 175 1 " That many another hath done the ^ame, Though not by a sound was the silence broken ; The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken." The matchless lines in " The Two Angels," a poem that commemorates the events of the birth of a child to Longfellow and the death of the beautiful wife of Lowell on the same night, in which the poet sees an angel with amaranths go to the door of his neighbor, while an angel with asphodels comes to his own door, strikes the tenderest chords of life. Longfellow was the poet of friendship, and he carried his heart friends wher- ever he went. The river Charles in his fancy made the letter C in its windings in the Brighton meadows before his door, and ever recalled three friends who had borne that name. One of the masterpieces of the work of his fading years is "Three Friends of Mine," in which he pictures Felton and Agassiz and the midnight parting with Charles Sumner at his door, and represents himself as one left to cover up the embers. Henry W. Longfellow, the poet of " Hope, Home, and History," was a de- scendant of the family of William Longfellow, who came from England to New- bury, Mass., in 1675, and a son of Stephen Longfellow, an eminent lawyer and public man. He was born in Portland, Me., February 27, 1807. The family con- sisted of eight children, of which he was the second, and of which two were poets, the other being the Unitarian hymn writer, Rev. Samuel Longfellow. He grew up a pure, loving boy in the schools of Portland, Me., fond of the woods, the hills, and the sea. " My Lost Youth " furnishes a delightful picture of this period of his life. It is said that his childhood fancy first found expression in the following rhymes : " Mr. Finney had a turnip That grew behind the barn, And it grew and it grew, But never did any harm." A member of the Longfellow family has denied that these luminous but not very promising lines were the first offering of his muse. If the anecdote be apocryphal, the boy Longfellow yet began to love poetry and to write it, and he became a newspaper poet, one of those common soldiers of literature, while a student. He read Irving at twelve, and was charmed with the matter and style of " Rip Van Winkle." He felt the charm of Horace a little later, and probably learned his first lesson in eloquent literature from the " Poetic Art " of the Augus- tine age of Rome in her glory. Says Horace : "He who writes what is use- ful with what is agreeable wins every vote : his book crosses the sea ; it will enrich the booksellers, and win for him imperishable fame." Longfellow learned to make what is useful, agreeable, and this principle was one of the great secrets of his success in literary life. His early poems that did useful and agreeable service in the poet's corner of the newspapers of the time were, so far as we know, never collected. A few of them, however, survive.
