In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which
every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that
old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and
touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never
heard of! Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have
floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and
Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion
incessantly blow. Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are
caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and
in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar
knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One
of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April",
and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus associated
in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be
always honored.
Both poems originally appeared in the _United States Literary Gazette_,
and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal
which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little
book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and
Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville
Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known
to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's
Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has
dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the
heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music
of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was
published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the
verses had been written and printed in the _Gazette_ while he was still
a student.
The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of
his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same
character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined,
manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle
manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon
him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green
meadows to the limpid rill.
His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related
that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore
year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when
afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college,
he proposed as its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he
remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly
accurately described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the
class of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence",
one of the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a quaint fancy of a letter from
"my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there
are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns
at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles;
Shelley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes
"Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and
George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just
published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before
in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from
college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to
the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense
application, at the University of Göttingen." Longfellow, in turn,
recalled his classmate Hawthorne--a shy, dark-haired youth flitting
across the college grounds in a coat with bright buttons.
Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work
of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the
characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its
half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for
this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March",
it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the
curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may
find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April"
a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the
echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They
both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American,
landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of
the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret
Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated
poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original
movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they
celebrate, they foretold a summer.
That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi
Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our
critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and
by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily,
however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming,
although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at
hand. Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was published in 1809, and Bryant's
"Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The _North American Review_, an
enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815,
and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year
1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning
of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were
signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of
subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the
publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's _Spy_, and
of Dana's _Idle Man_. Irving's _Sketch Book_ was already finished, Miss
Sedgwick's _Hope Leslie_ and Percival's first volume had been issued,
and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these
works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of
great creative genius.
The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike
posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the
voice of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in
cadences massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821
there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.
Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His
work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a
troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully
for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to
the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of
"Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done
no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very
Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected
as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his
countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep
and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to
it also his death was a national loss.
The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The
genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering
according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never
aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly
independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way
as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang,
wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to
Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply
affecting scholarship and literature. It was represented by the most
original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson,
and its elevating, purifying, and emancipating influences are memorable
in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very
heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too
was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk
deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important
works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its
literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained
without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and
attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the
intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it,
except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its
influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would
have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the
ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the
faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by
the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of
Napoleon.
It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's
first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of _Hyperion_
was published, following the sketches of travel, called _Outre-Mer_. He
was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in
which _Hyperion_ and all of his familiar books were written. Under
the form of a slight love tale, _Hyperion_ is the diary of a poet's
wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like
genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The
book bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country;
it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of
Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a
quaint scholarship, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so
glowing with the palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still
eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is
cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before.
_Hyperion_, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of deep
feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her
grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which
belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when
exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of
youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like
a field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched
with the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to
heaven. A clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this
romance. What is called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is
the play of an artist conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even
while his hand and his heart are deeply in earnest. _Werther_ is a
romance, Disraeli's _Wondrous Tale of Alroy_ is a romance, but they
belong to the realm of Beverley and Julia in Sheridan's _Rivals_. In
_Hyperion_, with all its elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary
atmosphere, and imaginative outline, there is a breezy freshness and
simplicity and healthiness of feeling which leaves it still unique.
In the same year with _Hyperion_ came the _Voices of the Night_,
a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the
translations, with a selection from the verses of the _Literary
Gazette_, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from
their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of
newspapers--gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys,
and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were
added, and these, with the _Hyperion_, showed a new and distinctive
literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit,
the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which
were already associated with Longfellow's name. But there are other
qualities. The boy of nineteen, the poet of Bowdoin, has become a
scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours, the ample opportunities of
youth, have not been neglected or squandered, but, like a golden-banded
bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has drained all the flowers
of literature of their nectar, and has built for himself a hive of
sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own experience the truth
of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is often the truest
benediction for the poet.
Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the _Voices of the Night_
and _Hyperion_, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even more
remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever
published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while
acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the
work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while
they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least--the "Psalm
of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"--penetrated the common heart at
once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them reprinted
in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in London,
repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and
the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight
Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled
a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a
vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and
the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very
heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was
a hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart.
During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the
_Voices of the Night_ to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly
increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly
poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon
a few gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During
those forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames
arose around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took
their places. But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always
associated at the head of American singers, and far beyond that of any
other American author was his name known through all the reading world.
The volume of _Voices of the Night_ was followed by similar collections,
then by _The Spanish Student_, _Evangeline_, _The Golden Legend_,
_Hiawatha_, _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, _The Tales of a Wayside
Inn_, _The New England Tragedies_, _The Masque of Pandora_, _The Hanging
of the Crane_, the _Morituri Salutarnus_, the _Kéramos_. But all of
these, like stately birds
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the upper realms of air,"
were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of passage", as the poet
called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while
the characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed
and illustrated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more
exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the
charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development
of his country were never more readily defined.
Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a
temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude
of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands
and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and
himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine
flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of
strength had come forth sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly
hymn", had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish
had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly
ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in
the most gracious and captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant
in his early secluded life among the solitary hills of Western
Massachusetts had been tinged by them with their own sobriety. There
was something of the sombre forest, of the gray rocky face of stern New
England in his granitic verse. But what delicate wild-flowers nodded in
the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree, what music of gurgling water,
filled the cool air! What bird high poised upon its solitary way through
heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his way alone!
But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of
Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and
shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have
often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true
beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed
was due to difference of temperament and circumstance. The foundations
of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they
rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary
Bohemia. The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American
authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of
the last generation--Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft,
Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley--have been all
sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.
Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have
illustrated the moral sanity of genius.
Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of
his verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous
poem, the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral
purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should
not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the
heart of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however
differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is
his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century
in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love;
Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of passion;
Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend;
and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic
affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the
universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the
pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the
common scene, these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful
and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the
singer the most widely beloved of living men.
Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no
tempests of mighty passion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled
problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and
variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It
was not Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a
passion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity
ever sang so little of love as a passion. None of his smaller poems are
love poems; and _Evangeline_ is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of
affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting
"beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and
tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has
described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of
his own poetry:
"Come read to me some poem,
Some simple and heart-felt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
"Hot from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
* * * * *
"Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer."
This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it
was fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the
fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its
natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there
were many "schools" and styles and fashions of poetry. The influence
first of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last
generation, and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric
splendor, as of the lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor
of much modern verse. But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful goddesses
won Longfellow from his sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the
true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity:
"Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."
The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth
wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the
peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute
for the lads and lasses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The
Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive
music the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the
lovely idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and
maidens in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated
hearts, for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch
the music of their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear
the voices of the peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the
benediction that belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that
the singer is gone, and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall
the words of Father Felicien, Evangeline's pastor:
"Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and
taught you
Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another."
It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling
to which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary
workmanship, which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in
literature. His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There
is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into
turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine
stateliness, as in the "Arsenal at Springfield", and even a resounding
splendor of diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most
delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it
large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought
or its most transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and
"Snow-Flakes".
The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness,
so to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in
literature, are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions
and names and illustrations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so
rare that the robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as
linen, and still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form.
This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as
showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under glass,
or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent
admirable paper in the _Evening Post_ intimates that the kindly poet
took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there
was never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work.
_Evangeline_ and _Hiawatha_ and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_
blossom as naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and
tendency as _The Golden Legend_ or the _Masque of Pandora_. In the
_Tales of a Wayside Inn_ the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a
play of his power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and
character of nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully,
beautifully, and accurately portrayed as in _Evangeline_. The scenery
of the poem is the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded
hill, brimming river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad
bayou, city and village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children
of many races, and all the blended panorama seen in the magic light
of imagination. So, too, the poetic character of the Indian legend is
preserved with conscientious care and fit monotony of rippling music in
_Hiawatha_. But this is an accident and an incident. It is not the theme
which determines the poet. All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the
verse of Burns, but very little of England is seen or heard in that of
Byron.
In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the
poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man,
and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant
lands, by
"The long wash of Australasian seas,"
that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character
were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or
feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man.
There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was
necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor
of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the
self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man.
He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university
town, itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate
and dividing the smooth grass and modest green terraces about the house
from the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles,
and the low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the
little gate passed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and
from every country to pay homage to their American friend. Every
morning came the letters of those who could not come in person, and
with infinite urbanity and sympathy and patience the master of the
house received them all, and his gracious hospitality but deepened the
admiration and affection of the guests. His nearer friends sometimes
remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to such annoying "devastators of
the day". But to an urgent complaint of his endless favor to a flagrant
offender, Longfellow only answered, good-humoredly, "If I did not speak
kindly to him, there is not a man in the world who would." On the day
that he was taken ill, six days only before his death, three schoolboys
came out from Boston on their Saturday holiday to ask his autograph. The
benign lover of children welcomed them heartily, showed them a hundred
interesting objects in his house, then wrote his name for them, and for
the last time.
Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow
more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone,
but his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song
of the lark in the morning of our literature:
"Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home."