BIRDS OF PASSAGE
Longfellow had always a ready faculty for grouping his shorter poems in
volumes, and had a series continuing indefinitely under the name of
"Birds of Passage," which in successive "flights" were combined with
longer works. The first was contained in the volume called "The
Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858); the second in "Tales of a Wayside
Inn" (1863); flight the third appeared in connection with "Aftermath"
(1873); flight the fourth in "Masque of Pandora and Other Poems" (1875),
and flight the fifth in "Keramos and Other Poems" (1878). These short
poems stand representative of his middle life, as "Voices of the Night"
and "Ballads" did for the earlier; and while the maturer works have not,
as a whole, the fervor and freshness of the first, they have more
average skill of execution.
The "Tales of a Wayside Inn" was the final grouping of several stories
which had accumulated upon him, large and small, and finally demanded a
title-page in common. Some of them had been published before and were
grouped into a volume in 1863, which, making itself popular, was
followed by two more volumes, finally united into one. We have what is
not usually the case, the poet's own account of them, he having written
thus to a correspondent in England: "'The Wayside Inn' has more
foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about
twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English
family by the name of Howe built there a country house, which has
remained in the family down to the present time, the last of the race
dying but two years ago. Losing their fortune, they became innkeepers;
and for a century the Red-Horse Inn has flourished, going down from
father to son. The place is just as I have described it, though no
longer an inn. All this will account for the landlord's coat-of-arms,
and his being a justice of the peace, and his being known as 'the
Squire,'--things that must sound strange in English ears. All the
characters are real. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel
Edrehi, whom I have seen as I have painted him," etc., etc.
Other participants in the imaginary festivities are the late Thomas W.
Parsons, the translator of Dante, who appears as the poet; the
theologian being Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard University, an
eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker,
but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising
scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the
Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had
been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of
this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which
Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of
the participants in the supposed group are now living except Signor
Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his
American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the
group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who
was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful
troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous
philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or
less allied to the Longfellow family by the marriage of her younger
brother, Mr. J. G. Thorp, to the poet's youngest daughter. The volume
has always been popular, even its most ample form; yet most of the
individual poems are rarely quoted, and with the exception of "Paul
Revere's Ride" and "Lady Wentworth" they are not very widely read. These
two are, it is to be observed, the most essentially American among them.
The book was originally to have been called "The Sudbury Tales," and was
sent to the printer in April, 1863, under that title, which was however
changed to "Tales of a Wayside Inn," through the urgency of Charles
Sumner.
It is the common fate of those poets who live to old age, that their
critics, or at least their contemporary critics, are apt to find their
later work less valuable than their earlier. Browning, Tennyson, and
Swinburne, to mention no others, have had to meet this fate, and
Longfellow did not escape it. Whether it is that the fame of the earlier
work goes on accumulating while the later has not yet been tested by
time, or that contemporary admirers have grown older and more critical
when they are introduced to the later verses, this is hard to decide.
Even when the greatest of modern poets completed in old age the dream of
his youth, it was the fashion for a long time to regard the completion
as a failure, and it took years to secure any real appreciation to the
second part of "Faust." This possibility must always be allowed for, but
the fact remains that the title which Longfellow himself chose for so
many of his poems, "Birds of Passage," was almost painfully suggestive
of a series of minor works of which we can only say that had his fame
rested on those alone, it would have been of quite uncertain tenure. A
very few of them, like "Keramos," "Morituri Salutamus," and "The Herons
of Elmwood," stand out as exceptions, and above all of these was the
exquisite sonnet already printed in this volume, "The Cross of Snow,"
recording at last the poet's high water-mark, as was the case with
Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." Apart from these, it may be truly said
that the little volume called "Flower de Luce" was the last collection
published by him which recalled his earlier strains. His volume "Ultima
Thule" appeared in 1880, and "In the Harbor," classed as a second part
to it, but issued by others after his death. With these might be placed,
though not with any precision, the brief tragedy of "Judas Maccabæus,"
which had been published in the "Three Books of Song," in 1872; and the
unfinished fragment, "Michael Angelo," which was found in his desk after
death. None of his dramatic poems showed him to be on firm ground in
respect to this department of poesy, nor can they, except the "Golden
Legend," be regarded as altogether successful literary undertakings. It
is obvious that historic periods differ wholly in this respect; and all
we can say is that while quite mediocre poets were good dramatists in
the Elizabethan period, yet good poets have usually failed as dramatists
in later days. Longfellow's efforts on this very ground were not less
successful, on the whole, than those of Tennyson and Swinburne; nor does
even Browning, tried by the test of the actual stage, furnish a complete
exception.