With sweet familiar tone;
But the voices of the children
Will be heard in dreams alone!
And the boy that walked beside me,
He could not understand
Why close in mine, ah! closer,
I pressed his little hand!
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote these lines perhaps he was thinking of the home of his boyhood in Portland, which his grandfather, General Peleg Wadsworth, built in 1785.
The house was the wonder of the town, for it was the first brick building erected there. The brick had been brought from Virginia. Originally there were but two stories; the third story was added when the future poet was eight years old.
Longfellow was born in the house at the corner of Fourth and Hancock streets, but he was only eight months old when he was carried within the inviting front doors of the Wadsworth house, and the mansion was home to him for at least thirty-five years.