CHAPTER XVIII HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) SUGGESTED READINGS HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. A Psalm of Life, The Village Blacksmith, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Excelsior, Serenade, The Day is Done, The Bridge, The Old Clock on the Stairs, The Arrow and the Song, Seaweed, Birds of Passage, from Evangeline, from The Song of Hiawatha, The Birds of Killingworth, The Children's Hour. Also poems from such collections as the following: BOYNTON, P. H. Milestones in American Literature, pp. 323-376. Ginn and Company. BOYNTON, P. H. American Poetry, pp. 366-420. Charles Scribner's Sons. CALHOUN, M. E., and MACALARNEY, E. L. Readings from American Literature, pp. 366-435. Ginn and Company. PAGE, C. H. Chief American Poets, pp. 102-258. Houghton Mifflin Company. STEDMAN, E. C. An American Anthology, pp. 111-126. Houghton Mifflin Company. In reading "Hiawatha" the eye is caught on almost every page by groups of lines beginning with the same words. What is the rhetorical name ("construction") for these "frequent repetitions," as Longfellow calls them in the poem? Compose some short passages in the same way on your daily school experience. Note Longfellow's characterizations of the Puritans in the poems mentioned on pages 274, 275 and compare these with Hawthorne's characterizations (see pages 228, 229). What is the moral of "The Birds of Killingworth"? Does the presence of the moral spoil the story? Is the story interesting regardless of the moral ? Read "Prelude," "The Day is Done," "Seaweed," and "Birds of Passage" (the single poem, not the group) for Longfellow's comments on the poet and the poetic art. CHAPTER OUTLINE Longfellow and the Cambridge group Two professorships and further travel The translations The ballads and the other lyrics The "Poems on Slavery" The turn to American themes The appeal to children as a series of stories The fitness of form to content The New England themes The later years of Longfellow Broadening and deepening of his work His limitations Longfellow and the Cambridge group. It is a common practice to mention Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) as a member of "the Cambridge group," with the suggestion that there was some such agreement in point of view as there was between the men who lived and wrote in Concord. Yet there was no such oneness of mind among Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes as among Emerson and his younger associates. Between Longfellow and Lowell the real point of contact was their scholarship, and particularly their enthusiasm for the writings of Dante; Lowell and Holmes were friendly but not intimate. The Cambridge men, to be sure, were different from the men of Concord. The fathers of all three were professional gentlemen of some distinction; all the poets were college-bred, ripened by residence abroad, and holders of professorships in Harvard College. All enjoyed and deserved social position as members of the "Brahmin caste," all were usually to be found at the celebrated Saturday Club luncheons, and all contributed to the early and lasting fame of the Atlantic Monthly. But as far as their deeper interests in life were concerned they went their several ways. Lowell was a representative first of New England and the North, and later of the country as a whole; LONGFELLOW'S HOME IN PORTLAND, MAINE Holmes belonged far more to Boston than to the college town across the Charles, so that Longfellow, the only one of the three not born there, was most closely associated with Cambridge, less clearly allied with any other part of the world. In the literary vista, therefore, the local relationship should not loom too large. Longfellow should be considered as belonging to the same decades with Poe and Hawthorne; his greatest productive period was at its height when Poe was living, and was over before the death of Hawthorne, and his attitude toward life was much like theirs. Lowell, in contrast, was a factor in the issues leading into and out of the Civil War, and Holmes's richest years bridged the sixties. The formative life of Longfellow-college and first travels abroad. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the second of eight children. The matters of conventional record are that on his mother's side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden, and that his father was a lawyer with a good practice and a modestly well-equipped library. Able tutoring fitted the boy to enter as a sophomore in Bowdoin, in the class with Hawthorne, who was three years older. For a coming man of letters his student record was exceptionally good. Instead of being unsettled by vague dreams, he was stirred by a very definite ambition for success as an author. His whole soul, he wrote in a letter from college, burned most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centered in it. Then, just at the time when he was making up his mind to become a lawyer, in order not to be, like Goldsmith, "equally irreclaimable from poetry and poverty," the trustees of Bowdoin, following the example of Harvard, established a professorship of modern languages, offered it to Longfellow, and set as a condition that he should prepare himself by study abroad. In the three years from 1826 to 1829 his mastering of French, Italian, and Spanish was perhaps less important than his breathing the cultural atmosphere of the Old World. Life in America up to the nineteenth century had been a busy and self-centered experience. The chief consciousness of England and Europe had been a consciousness of other governments and of unsympathetic and conflicting loyalties (see page 100); but now America was beginning to think not only of how other peoples were ruled but also of how they lived and what they were thinking about. Longfellow had little to say of foreign unfriendliness, which was still disturbing Irving and Cooper and Bryant (see pages 111, 138). In preparing to teach foreign languages and literatures he yielded to the spell of their richly picturesque traditions, and his first work, "Outre-Mer" (1833), was an effort to expound these to his countrymen. This, too, Irving and Cooper had done, and from now on the refrain was to be taken up by most of the widely-read American writers. A short list of such works will include Longfellow's "Hyperion" (1839), Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands" (1854), Emerson's "English Traits" (1856), Bryant's "Letters from Spain and Other Countries" (1859), Hawthorne's "Our Old Home" (1863), Howells's "Venetian Life" (1866), Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" (1869), and so on down to and beyond Holmes's "Our Hundred Days in Europe" (1887). Two professorships and further travel. As an impressionable young American he fell into the sentimental tone of the period (see page 115) and wrote characteristically to his mother: "I look forward to the distant day of our meeting until my heart swells into my throat and tears into my eyes. I cannot help thinking that it is a pardonable weakness." He HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was so absorbed by all he was seeing and learning that he wrote no verse, letting the days go by until he concluded, with the overwhelming seriousness of budding manhood, that his poetic career was finished. As a matter of fact, he was just adding to his native American feeling a sense of the glamor of Old World civilization, and was on the way toward combining the two as poet and professor. Returning to his old college he taught there until in 1836 he was invited to succeed Professor George Ticknor at Harvard, again with the condition-implied if not imposed--that he go abroad for study. On his second sojourn he extended his knowledge to the Germanic languages, mastering them as thoroughly as he had French, Spanish, and Italian. In the end he is said to have had a fluent speaking control of eight tongues, with the power to "get along" in six more, and to read yet another six. Until 1854 he was at work in Harvard College, giving no little instruction, securing all his assistants, and personally supervising their teaching. It was an irksome routine, against which he began to rebel many years before he shook himself free. "It is too much to do for one's daily bread, |