Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in England, of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807; he was two years older than Tennyson. He was a contemporary at Bowdoin College of his country's greatest novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1826 he began three "travel-years" which prepared him for the Chair of French and Spanish literature, first held by George Ticknor in 1817; he first taught at Bowdoin, and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American literature now began to be affected by the poets of the European continent, which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the Elizabethan age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure and elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow; and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Elizabethans were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the United States is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, and Burns were never its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter". Longfellow, whom Poe absurdly accuses of plagiarism, was no imitator. He had a note, simple indeed, but his own. As far as any traces in his work of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are apparent, we might suppose that he had never read them. This kind of originality is not always found even in considerable poets. The measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from "Christabel"; Burns usually had a model which he transfigured; Byron's Oriental tales in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification;—but the minor poet is always imitative.
Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, was "still a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. Lowell. While occupying an academic Chair he published perhaps his best-known work, "The Voices of the Night" (1839), his "Evangeline" (pathos in English hexameters) in 1847, and "The Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first book Longfellow "made a bull's-eye" in hitting the public taste. The bull's-eye rang to the anvil strokes of "The Village Blacksmith". Young men shouted "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two Writers to the Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in "Marmion" on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that
To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
or
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
or
The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,
are perhaps even more provocative than "Excelsior" to him who shouts "for his personal diversion". But it is much to write verses which provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to be stirred by literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in "Excelsior" was rather "in a coming on disposition,"
He answered as he turned away,
"What would the Junior Proctor say?"
is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in "The Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, though he has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er Time's dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his glass, that somebody has left footprints on the sands. Enfin, these poems have "that!" as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are mixed as if by the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things are not Longfellow's masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal viking's "Skeleton in Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical boyhood. At any age we may appreciate such lines as—