Literary and Social Essays

by George William Curtis

In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never heard of! Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion incessantly blow. Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April", and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus associated in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be always honored.

Both poems originally appeared in the United States Literary Gazette, and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the verses had been written and printed in the Gazette while he was still a student.

The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined, manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green meadows to the limpid rill.

His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college, he proposed as its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly accurately described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the class of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence", one of the Mosses from an Old Manse, a quaint fancy of a letter from "my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles; Shelley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes "Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of Göttingen." Longfellow, in turn, recalled his classmate Hawthorne—a shy, dark-haired youth flitting across the college grounds in a coat with bright buttons.

Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March", it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April" a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American, landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they celebrate, they foretold a summer.

That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily, however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming, although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at hand. Irving's Knickerbocker was published in 1809, and Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The North American Review, an enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815, and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year 1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's Spy, and of Dana's Idle Man. Irving's Sketch Book was already finished, Miss Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and Percival's first volume had been issued, and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of great creative genius.

The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the voice of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in cadences massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821 there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity.

Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of "Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to it also his death was a national loss.

The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang, wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply affecting scholarship and literature. It was represented by the most original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson, and its elevating, purifying, and emancipating influences are memorable in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it, except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of Napoleon.

It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of Hyperion was published, following the sketches of travel, called Outre-Mer. He was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in which Hyperion and all of his familiar books were written. Under the form of a slight love tale, Hyperion is the diary of a poet's wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The book bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country; it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a quaint scholarship, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so glowing with the palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before.