LONGFELLOW BECOMES A FAMOUS POET
When Longfellow went to live in Cambridge he was just thirty years old.
He had not then written any of the poems that are famous to-day, but he
began at once to produce most of those that we love best. A good many
of them were sent to the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of them was the
“Psalm of Life,” for which he was promised five dollars, which, however,
was never paid him. A poem then called “Floral Astrology,” but now known
as “Flowers,” was the first to have his full name attached—“Harvard
College, H. W. Longfellow.” The “Psalm of Life” was signed simply “L.”
Both of these poems and “The Reaper and the Flowers” (published in the
same magazine in the same way, at the same price, which was never paid)
had been copied into hundreds of newspapers and were public favorites
without the author’s being in the least known. His friends knew
Longfellow wrote the poems, but the public did not.
His cousin, John Owen, kept a bookstore in Cambridge. One day Owen
went to him and told him he ought to have some of his poems printed in
a little volume, and with his name. Longfellow objected to having his
name appear, though he thought it might be a good idea to have the poems
published if a publisher could be found. His cousin said he should like
to publish them; to this Longfellow assented, but for some time refused
to have his name appear. At last he said, “Well, bring them out in your
own way!” That meant, with his name on the title page.
That little volume, entitled “Voices of the Night,” and including the
poems still printed in Longfellow’s collected works under that title, was
published in 1839, when Longfellow was thirty-two years old. It contained
the “Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “The Light of Stars,”
“Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Beleaguered City,” and “Midnight
Mass to the Dying Year.” There were also some translations, and a few of
the poems he had published while in college.
That book made Longfellow famous as a poet. A few critics found fault
with it, but not many, and hundreds of others liked it and praised it.
Longfellow himself tells a pretty story of the “Psalm of Life.” “I was
once riding in London,” said he, “when a laborer approached the carriage
and asked, ‘Are you the writer of the “Psalm of Life?”’ ‘I am.’ ‘Will you
allow me to shake hands with you?’ We clasped hands warmly. The carriage
passed on, and I saw him no more; but I remember that as one of the most
gratifying compliments I ever received, because it was so sincere.”
In a published letter from Charles Sumner, there is another touching
story of the power this wonderful poem possesses over men.
A man who had been very unlucky, an old classmate of Sumner’s, went to
his office to prove some debts in bankruptcy. Sumner asked him what he
read. He replied that he read very little; that he hardly found anything
that was written from the heart and was really true. “Have you read
Longfellow’s Hyperion?” Sumner asked him. “Yes,” he replied, “and I
admire it very much; I think it a very great book.” He then added in a
very solemn manner, “I think I may say that Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’
saved me from suicide. I first found it on a scrap of newspaper, in the
hands of two Irish women, soiled and worn; and I was at once touched by
it.”
The Chinese translator and noted scholar, Tung Tajen, a great admirer
of Longfellow, sent the poet a Chinese fan, upon which was inscribed in
Chinese characters a translation of the “Psalm of Life.” The fan is one
of the folding kind, and the characters are inscribed on it in vertical
columns.
An Englishman serving on the staff of the American minister in China
found this beautiful poem in Chinese and translated it back into English,
not knowing that it had been written originally in English. Here is
a verse of the translation he made. You will scarcely recognize the
familiar—
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.
AS TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE.
Do not manifest your discontent in a piece of verse:
A hundred years (of life) are, in truth, as one asleep (so soon are
they gone);
The short dream (early death), the long dream (death after long life),
alike are dreams (so little is the body concerned; after death)
There still remains the spirit (which is able to) fill the universe.
The words in parenthesis were not in the Chinese and the translator
supplied them to complete the sense in English.