XI

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

REFERENCES

WORKS: Riverside Edition, 11 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1886; Cambridge Edition, 1 vol., Boston: Houghton, 1893. The latter does not include Longfellow's translation of Dante.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: *Samuel Longfellow, Life and Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1891; G. R. Carpenter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1901 (BB); T. W. Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Boston: Houghton, 1902 (AML); E. S. Robertson, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, London: Scott, 1887 (Gw); *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter vi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. S. Robertson's Longfellow, i-xii (at end); Foley, 174-180; Longfellow Collector's Handbook, a Bibliography of First Editions, New York: Benjamin, 1885.

SELECTIONS: Carpenter, 248–256; Duyckinck, II, 445-450; Griswold, Poets, 356-362; Griswold, Prose, 496–502; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 108; Stedman, 111-126; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 282-324.

AMONG the men of letters who in mature life gathered Life. about the Atlantic Monthly the most popular was HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882). Born at Portland, Maine, where his father was a lawyer, he went at fifteen to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, where he took his degree in 1825. At that time there were also at Bowdoin J. S. C. Abbott, the historian, Franklin Pierce, who became President of the United States, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. During these college years, too, the spirit of Renaissance was freshest in New England air. Channing's great sermon on Unitarianism had been preached

Smith Professorship.

in 1819; Emerson's sermon on the Lord's Supper, which marks the beginning of transcendental disintegration, was not preached until 1832. Longfellow's youth, in brief, came just when the religious and philosophic buoyancy of the New England Renaissance was surging; and this affected him all the more because in a region and at a

Hanny W Longfellow

college where old-fashioned orthodoxy still prevailed, he was from the beginning a Unitarian. When Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin at the age of nineteen, Ticknor's teaching at Harvard, then in its seventh year, had made such general impression that the authorities of Bowdoin began to desire something similar there. In 1826, accordingly, Longfellow went abroad under an agree

ment to prepare himself, by a three years' study of modern languages, for a Bowdoin professorship which should resemble Ticknor's at Harvard. In 1829 he came home with a reading knowledge of Spanish, Italian, French, and German, and began to teach at Bowdoin. Six years later, when Ticknor retired from teaching, he recommended Longfellow to the Corporation of Harvard; and Longfellow, who up to that time had had little personal relation with Cambridge, accepted the Smith professorship. To prepare himself for this wider field of work, he went abroad for a year more. In 1836 he began his teaching at Harvard, which continued for eighteen years.

As these years went on, Longfellow, like Ticknor, felt

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more and more how gravely the drudgery of teaching must interfere with work which time may well prove more lasting and significant. His constant, enthusiastic wish was to be a poet. In 1854 he consequently resigned the professorship. The next year it was given to James Russell Lowell, who held it, at least in title, until his death in 1891.

Up to 1854, Longfellow, although already popular as a poet, remained a college professor of a new and radical subject. Though he always loved this subject, he hated the use which his professional circumstances compelled him to make of it. The instinct which made him recoil from the drudgery of teaching was sound: his true mission was not to struggle with unwilling hearers; it was rather to set forth in words which should find their way to the eager readers of a continent the spirit as distinguished from the letter of the literatures with which as a professor he conscientiously dealt so long.

in Cam

bridge.

From 1854 to the end, Longfellow lived as a profes- Longfellow sional author in that fine old Cambridge house which before his time was conspicuous as the deserted mansion of some Tories exiled by the Revolution, and which is now consecrated as the home of the most widely popular and beloved American poet. Long before he died, his reputation as a man of letters was so firmly established that people had almost forgotten how he had once been a college teacher.

For this forgetfulness there is plenty of reason. Though throughout Longfellow's professorship he had felt its duties seriously to prevent literary labor, he had produced during his incumbency much of his most familiar verse. His Voices of the Night appeared in 1839, his Evangeline in 1847, and his Golden Legend in 1851. Even before

he laid his professorship down, there were hundreds who knew him as a poet for every one who knew that he was a teacher. In point of fact, too, the work which he did during the twenty-seven years of his purely literary life hardly extended, although it certainly maintained, the poetical

reputation which he had already established during his twenty-five years of teaching. To understand his real character as a poet, however, we must constantly keep in mind that other profession of teacher which he so faithfully practised for a full third of his life.

The subjects which Longfellow taught now have a familiar place in every good college. In his time they resembled some newly discovered continent, where whole realms of country are still unknown. To Longfellow, accordingly, the true business of his professorship seemed like that of an enthusiastic explorer. The languages which he learned

so eagerly never seemed to him deserving of lifelong study for themselves; they were merely vehicles of expression which carried him into new and wonderful worlds of beautiful old humanity. These vehicles were to be loved so far as in beautiful form they conveyed to us thoughts intrinsically beautiful and noble, but they were at best vehicles, whose use was to lead us into inexhaustible regions of humanity, unknown except by vague tradition to our American ancestors.

Temper.

In his love for literature thus considered, Longfellow Academic never wavered. What vexed him throughout the years of his teaching was not the matter with which he dealt; it was rather that he shrank from imparting literature to unwilling pupils, that he longed to saturate himself with it and to express unfettered the sentiments which it unfailingly stirred within him. These sentiments, which he uttered in a manner so welcome to all America, seemed to him as spontaneous as ever inspiration seemed to poets who have heard the true whisper of the Muse. Yet one who now studies his work can hardly help feeling that even though he never suspected the fact, his temper as a man of letters was almost as academic as was the profession to which he reluctantly devoted year after year of his maturity.

Even as a teacher Longfellow remained a man of letters; he felt constantly stirred to what he believed original expression, and he was never content unless he was phrasing as well as he could the emotions which arose within him amid all the drudgery of work. But if in this aspect Longfellow was a genuine man of letters, he was all the while an academic scholar; for the influence which stirred him most was not what he experienced, but rather what he read. From beginning to end he was inspired