apparent solution of the difficulty in the shape of an offer from the trustees of Bowdoin to establish for Longfellow a professorship of modern languages, on condition that he should spend some time in Europe preparing for the position. His father provided the necessary money for foreign travel and study. The season of the year was not favorable for sailing, so it was not until the following May (1826), that he began the long voyage from New York to Havre. Meanwhile he spent some time in reading law in his father's office, and more in writing verses, some of which were printed in the Atlantic Souvenir of Philadelphia, and others in the United States Literary Gazette of Boston, to which he had already contributed during his last year in college. A few of these pieces were preserved in the section entitled Earlier Poems' of Longfellow's first volume of original verse, published fourteen years later.

On arriving in Europe, in June, 1826, he went first to Paris, and spent about eight months there; then to Spain (where he met Washington Irving), for nearly a year; then to Italy for almost another year (1828); and to Germany for his last six months, returning home in August, 1829. He had acquired a good practical knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian, but had found German more difficult, and made comparatively little progress in it.

Longfellow entered on his work as a teacher of modern languages and literatures in September, 1829. The idea that study of the modern languages could form any serious part of a college curriculum was at that time a new one. Only one important professorship in the subject existed. There were not even any elementary text-books for English speaking students, and Longfellow had to begin by making his own. He published a translation of L'Homond's French Grammar; an elementary reading book in French, called Manuel de Proverbes Dramatiques; and a similar book for Spanish; he wrote in French a syllabus of the elements of Italian grammar, and edited a collection of extracts from Italian writers, writing his preface in Italian. He attended carefully and thoroughly to his work, hearing recitations, composing and correcting exercises, etc., and found time to write, outside of his text-books, only a few articles for the North American Review, dealing in elementary fashion with the French, Italian, and Spanish languages and literatures. He found the profession which he had chosen no less exacting than the law would have been, and almost more so; since, by employing him on work closely similar in kind to that which he most desired to do, it left him little freshness of mind for original composition. His work was well and faithfully done, however; he had the respect and liking of his students; and in 1834 the most important position within the field of his chosen work was offered to him, the 'Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and of Belles Lettres,' at Harvard, previously held, since its foundation in 1816, by Ticknor. With the offer came a suggestion from the President of the University: Should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside in Europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months, for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the German, Mr. Ticknor will retain his office till your return.'

Longfellow eagerly accepted this offer. He had been married in 1831 to Mary Potter of Portland, and they sailed for Europe in April, 1835. They went first to England, then to Holland, where Mrs. Longfellow fell ill, and died in November. Longfellow was more than most men one for whom it was not good that he should be alone.' The rest of his year in Europe was spent in the shadow of sorrow and loneliness. He studied faithfully, mastered the German language, and buried himself in the reading of the modern German romantic literature, the influence of which is so strong in his prose romance, Hyperion. This romance was in part inspired by Miss Frances Appleton, whom he met the following summer in Switzerland, and who appears in it as Mary Ashburton.

On his return to America in the autumn (1836), he entered on the duties of his professorship at Harvard. He had somewhat less of routine work to do than at Bowdoin, and more lecturing. He had one assistant for each of the foreign languages taught, but still retained personal oversight of the work of each student, and often was confined to his classroom

work for three whole days in each week. He now formed broader and richer friendships than he had known before, particularly with Charles Sumner, then teaching in the Harvard Law School, with C. C. Felton, professor of Greek, and later President, with George S. Hillard, and others; and renewed his college friendship with Hawthorne. He had grown with the experiences of life, and now found the mechanical duties which filled so much of his time more irksome than before. Perhaps the worst thing in college life,' he wrote in his Journal, is this having your mind constantly a playmate for boys, constantly adapting itself to them, instead of stretching out and grappling with men's minds;' and again: Lecturing is all well enough, and in my history is an evident advance upon the past. But now one of my French teachers is gone, and this dragooning of schoolboys in lessons is like going backward.' On the whole, however, he believed in his work: 'Have I been wise to give up three whole days (in the week) to college classes? I think I have; for thus I make my presence felt here, and have no idle time to mope and grieve;' and again: After all Cambridge delighteth my heart exceedingly. I have fallen upon books with a most voracious appetite; ... no doubt, if I could bring myself to give up all my time to the college... I could get along very comfortably, but the idea of standing still or going backward is not to be entertained.' Constantly the memory of his early ambitions, and of how little he has done to achieve them, returns to him: I could live very happily here if I could chain myself down to college duties and be nothing but a professor. I should then have work enough, and recreation enough. But I am too restless for this. What should I be at fifty? A fat mill-horse, grinding round with blinkers on.... This will not do. It is too much for one's daily bread when one can live on so little.'

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These extracts are from his Journal of 1838-39; and it is in these same years that he is writing the few brief and simple poems that are the real beginning of his poetical work: the Psalm of Life,' the 'Light of Stars,' the Hymn to the Night,' Footsteps of Angels,' and the Beleaguered City.' These five poems and four others almost equally well known, with seven Earlier Poems,' were collected and published in a slender volume called Voices of the Night, in 1839. Hyperion was published in the same year. Two years later he published another small collection entitled Ballads and Other Poems, containing the 'Skeleton in Armor,' the Wreck of the Hesperus,' the Village Blacksmith,' Endymion,' the Rainy Day,' 'Maidenhood,' and 'Excelsior.' In 1842 the Spanish Student' appeared, as a serial, in Graham's Magazine.

Longfellow was now thirty-five years old. His health was somewhat impaired by his years of close work, and he found himself compelled to take a half-year's leave of absence, which he spent mostly at Marienberg, in Germany. Here began his lasting friendship with Freiligrath, who later translated 'Hiawatha.' On his way home he passed through England, met Landor and Dickens, read Dickens's American Notes, and was particularly impressed with the grand chapter on slavery,' as he calls it. During the return voyage, being confined to his cabin for about a fortnight, he wrote the seven brief Poems on Slavery. These, with one additional poem, were published in a little volume of thirty-one pages, in December, 1842, and were hailed with delight by the abolitionists, who felt that a very strong ally had joined their forces. Longfellow, however, declined to accept the congressional nomination which was offered him through Whittier by the Liberty party, or to take any further part in the anti-slavery contest. He even omitted the poems on slavery from the first collected edition of his poems, an act for which he has been severely blamed. Yet even Lowell, ardent abolitionist as he was at the time, and uncompromising as he was on the question of omitting any of his own anti-slavery poems, felt that Longfellow was justified in doing so, since he might well consider these poems to be the least valuable part of his work. It is probable, also, that the gentle Longfellow, who did not lack courage, but who did lack the fighting edge,' omitted the poems rather from a genuine desire to avoid wounding any of his readers than from mere policy. In any case, the poems are unimportant. I have attempted only to invest the subject with a poetic coloring,' wrote Longfellow to John Forster; and that is all he succeeded in doing; many will say, with a false poetic coloring. The Poems on Slavery have none of the deep

conviction and intensity of Whittier's or Lowell's, and are more closely related to German literary romanticism than to American social conditions.

Longfellow had not even yet found himself,' and had barely begun, in a few ballads, his real poetical work. He had written in his Journal in 1840, speaking of a visit to Mr. Norton: There I beheld what perfect happiness may exist on this earth, and felt how I stood alone in life, cut off for a while from those dearest sympathies for which I long.' It was at Marienberg that he wrote the sonnet Mezzo Cammin,' oppressed with a feeling that, though he was the author of a few brief and popular poems, yet he had spent half of man's allotted years without having begun that 'tower of song with lofty parapet,' which it had been his ambition to build. He was almost entirely dependent upon home life and home affection; and when he at last found these, in his marriage with Miss Frances Appleton, in 1843, his maturity and the creative period of his life really began. He finished his work as a mere editor and compiler (except for the Poems of Places, much later) with the Poets and Poetry of Europe,' in 1845. At the end of that year was published the Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, dated 1846, which closes the first period of his work, and already shows a great advance in artistic quality over the crude moralizing and vaguely romantic commonplace of his earliest work. The first collected edition of his poems had been published in a sumptuous volume by Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, in 1845, and Evangeline' was just begun.

The characteristics of all Longfellow's work, which are especially marked in its first period, are not such as appeal either to the intellectual critic or to the lover of art for art's sake. A good deal of its romantic imagery strikes us now as false, and its simplicity as bathos. Excelsior' is a truly imaginative conception, but in expression it degenerates into 'A tear stood in his bright blue eye. But still he answered with a sigh,' etc. The expression is truly imaginative in that French passage from which he took the idea of the 'Old Clock on the Stairs,' yet Longfellow makes of it such lines as 'Some are married, some are dead,' which is almost as bad as the line that Tennyson declared to be typical Wordsworthian blank verse, ' A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.' But it is the very triumph of these early poems that most of their lines seem more commonplace than they really are, because they have become, by their simplicity and genuineness, a part of the universal feeling of the race. Simple and genuine they are, except for the false romantic imagery already spoken of, such as is found in the 'Reaper and the Flowers.' Their appeal is universal; and to each individual it may at some time be new, as it was to all the young America of 1840. Even in our sophisticated times, it would be a pretty poor sort of youth who would not still be thrilled at his first reading of the 'Psalm of Life.' 'The Day is Done,' hackneyed as it is, is still full of simple and restful beauty.

On the last day of 1845, Longfellow wrote in his Journal: Peace to the embers of burnt-out things; fears, anxieties, doubts, all gone! I see them now as a thin blue smoke, hanging in the bright heaven of the past year, vanishing away into utter nothingness. Not many hopes deceived, not many illusions scattered, not many anticipations disappointed; but love fulfilled, the heart comforted, the soul enriched with affection!' The first period of his life and writing was in fact finished, and his next fifteen years were to contain the largest and the most important part of his poetical work. In the earlier period he had been growing, experimenting, preluding; in the third and last period, which was to follow 1861, he touched deeper notes sometimes, and attained to greater artistic beauty and condensation; but he produced no such large body of lasting work as in the 'middle period.

This middle period, from the end of 1845 to the beginning of 1861, contains Evangeline' (1847); Hiawatha' (1855); the Courtship of Miles Standish ' (1858); the 'Building of the Ship,' and other poems, especially of the home, in The Seaside and the Fireside (dated 1850, published 1849); the Golden Legend (1851); the 'Saga of King Olaf' and others of the best Tales of a Wayside Inn, not published until later; My Lost Youth ;' the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz;' and some of Longfellow's most beautiful poems of childhood, including Children,' and 'The Children's Hour.' Longfellow's own home was made complete in these years by the coming of his five children, three girls and two boys,

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and his outside life was broadened by his growing friendship with Agassiz, Lowell, and Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, and by his continued close relations with Sumner. The duties of his professorship, however, were becoming more and more irksome to him. What vexes me most,' he wrote in 1847, 'is being cribbed and shut up in college, not that I'dislike work, but that I have other work to do than this;' and again later: I seem to be quite banished from all literary work save that of my professorship. . . . I am tired, not of work, but of the sameness of work . . . these hours in the lecture-room, like a schoolmaster! It is pleasant enough when the mind gets engaged in it, — but "art is long and life is short. "" In 1853 he wrote nothing except the brief poem to Lowell, 'The Two Angels.' In 1854, realizing that his means were quite adequate for his support without a college salary, they had been so since his second marriage, — he finally decided to resign his professorship and devote himself entirely to literature. The next few years were full of work. Hiawatha' was written immediately after his retirement from the professorship, the Courtship of Miles Standish and other Poems was published in 1858, and in the next three years were written many of his best shorter poems and some of the Tales of a Wayside Inn.

·

Longfellow had his greatest success as a narrative poet. For the average reader the tale's the thing,' and Longfellow possessed the surprisingly rare faculty of telling a simple story well. For him too the tale was the thing; he realized by instinct the simple and essential first point that it must be constantly interesting, and he had the faculty of making it so. In local flavor and truth of detail his work is vastly inferior to Whittier's. Some score of years after he wrote the Wreck of the Hesperus,' he still vaguely wondered just where the Reef of Norman's Woe might be, though it was not fifteen miles from his own summer home. He knew the country of Hiawatha' only through books, and for Evangeline' he formed his ideas of the Mississippi from reading (perhaps mostly in Chateaubriand), and from a pictorial diorama which was exhibited at Boston while he was writing the poem, and which he enthusiastically welcomed as a great help. Yet his narrative, as such, is better even than Whittier's, whether in the ringing ballads of the Northland, from the 'Skeleton in Armor' to the Saga of King Olaf,' or in the gentler, easily flowing tales that are more characteristic of his own mood, from 'Evangeline' to 'King Robert of Sicily' or the 'Birds of Killingworth.' And in Hiawatha,' by some wondrous alchemy due to the true simplicity of his own mind, he did catch the true local color, even in detail as well as in mood, of a life that he had never seen. Hiawatha ' has worn surprisingly well, and has stood the test of being judged even by the people whose life and legends it describes. It stands out, more and more, as Longfellow's most important work. This is anything but the fate predicted for it by those intellectual critics who (with the exception of Emerson) judged it so severely at its first appearance. In the Courtship of Miles Standish,' Longfellow was dealing with a life that he knew more intimately, by its partial survival and by its traditions living all about him, as well as from books; though he did not take the trouble to visit Plymouth until the poem had been completed. His treatment of this theme is entirely happy and true. The Golden Legend' is naturally much less so, though it is by far the best part of the ambitious trilogy which he planned, under the title of Christus: a Mystery. It has charm and the glamour of medieval story, but Longfellow was manifestly unfitted for any real dramatic composition, or for the broad picturing of a great period like the Middle Ages.

In 1861 came the tragic break in Longfellow's life. It was in July. Mrs. Longfellow's light summer dress caught fire, and she was so severely burned that she died the next morning. Longfellow also was seriously burned in trying to smother the flames, and could not leave his room on the day of her funeral, the anniversary of their wedding day.

The story of his next few years is completely told in the first of the 'Divina Commedia' sonnets. That of the later years is suggested in the Cross of Snow.' 'I have taken refuge in this translation of the Divina Commedia,' he wrote to his friend Freiligrath. For a while he wrote little else, except to complete and publish, at the end of 1863, the first part of Tales of a Wayside Inn; the second and third parts were published in

1872 and 1873. The two New England Tragedies, the first of which had been written in 1856-57, were published in 1868, the Divine Tragedy was written and published in 1871, and the completed Christus in 1872. He wrote Morituri Salutamus,' for the fiftieth anniversary of his college class, and this was published in 1875, in the Masque of Pandora and Other Poems, together with the Hanging of the Crane,' which was written for Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and which holds a peculiar place in Longfellow's work, as summing up within itself so many of the different aspects of home life, of all of which he was the poet laureate.

During this last period of his life, he wrote often in a form which he had hardly more than once or twice tried before, except for translations, the sonnet. In much of the work of this period, especially the sonnets, his feeling is deeper and stronger (it could not be truer), and his expression richer and more condensed, than before. Longfellow was always a true artist and careful of the form of his work, as few of our American poets, except Poe, have been. The little lyric Sea-Weed,' of an earlier period, shows how carefully and well he could fit the form of his idea to a somewhat intricate stanza. But his art was never rich or varied, and he lacked most of all that tenseness of expression which is the mark of any very strong artistic or imaginative feeling for language. In the sonnets, however, his feeling, now deepened and strengthened by the experiences of his constantly growing life, and by his communion with Dante, was confined within the narrow walls of a form that did not allow it to flow out thin over the marshes of the commonplace, as it had so often done before, and as it did still in the Hanging of the Crane.' There is much of this same strength and condensation in his noble Morituri Salutamus.'

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Longfellow's last years were made happier by the devotion of his own children, and by the love of all children who knew him and it would seem that few in America, or even in England or Germany, did not know him. The story of his gift from the Cambridge schoolchildren on his seventy-second birthday, and of their constant visits to his home, is too well known to be repeated. His seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated in the schools throughout the United States, and was made memorable also by Whittier's poem, The Poet and the Children.' He died not quite a month later, March 24, 1882. Longfellow's life was that of a simple, faithful, true man and gentleman, kindly and home-loving. And that is what he has put into his verse. He has been well called 'the laureate of the common human heart.' He is first and most of all the poet of the home. There is not an aspect of home life that he has not touched and beautified. If much of his poetry is mere commonplace, it is always the making beautiful of the commonplace. Bryant's poetry often-as in the well-known lines from The Battle-Field,' and Emerson's still oftener, are the making noble of the commonplace. Whittier's is the simple and true rendering of it. Whitman's is the apotheosis of it. Poe is the only one of our chief elder poets who is not commonplace, who detests and despises the commonplace.

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Next, Longfellow is the only American who has successfully written poems of any considerable length. The long poem is different from the short poem, as the novel is from the short story, not only in quantity, but in kind. For those who can conceive only that kind or class of poetry which finds fit expression in the short poem, Poe's dictum that 'there is no such thing as a long poem' is true; for the poem which by its nature belongs to the short poem class, yet tries to extend itself to greater length, is, as Poe saw, tably a failure. The long poem is an entirely different literary class or genre. It is Longfellow's distinctive glory that he had the patience and the sustained artistic power to win success in this difficult form, - a kind of success which is almost the rarest in literature, and second only to success in the true dramatic presentation of character and life. Without comparing Longfellow's achievement in this field with that of greater foreign poets, we may say that it alone would give him an unanswerable claim to the largest space in any fully representative collection of our chief American poets.