Compare the war poetry of Whittier and Freneau.

In Whittier’s controversial poetry note the different levels of “Barbara Frietchie,” “Expostulation,” and “The Waiting,” and cite other poems which may fairly be located in these three classes.

Read Whittier’s ballads with the comments on page 261 concerning his inclination to expound. Compare and contrast Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” with Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night.”

Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry to those poems of Whittier’s which you regard as general favorites.

CHAPTER XVIII
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

It is a matter of 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 existed 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; between Lowell and Holmes there was neighborly regard but no real intimacy of feeling. 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 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,”[17] all were frequenters of the celebrated Saturday Club, 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; Holmes belonged far more to Boston than to the college town across the Charles; so that, of the three, Longfellow, the only one 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 similar to theirs in its sentimental fervor and in its artistic detachment. Lowell, in contrast, was a factor in the issues leading into and out of the Civil War, and Holmes’s richest years bridged the ’60’s.

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 matriculate as a sophomore in Bowdoin, in the class with Hawthorne, who was three years older. For a coming man of letters his record as a student was exceptionally good. Instead of being unsettled by vague dreams, he was stirred by a very definite ambition for “future eminence in literature.” His whole soul, he wrote to his father at the age of seventeen, burned most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centered in it. Then, just at the time when he was resigning himself to the law, in order not to be, like Goldsmith, “equally irreclaimable from poetry and poverty,” the trustees of Bowdoin, emulating 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 the Romance languages 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; and now was beginning to arise an awareness 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 pp. 111–114). 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.[18]

As an impressionable young American he fell into the declining sentimentalism of the period 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 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 twenty-two that his poetic career was finished. As a matter of fact he was just complementing his native American feeling with a sense of the glamour 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 engaged in his duties at Harvard, giving no little instruction, engaging 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, when one can live on so little,” he wrote in 1839. “I must learn to give up superfluous things and devote myself wholly to literature.” And in the same year he referred in another letter to “poetic dreams shaded by French irregular verbs.”

If the distractions of his professorship had actually prevented all writing, he would doubtless not have held it eighteen years; but in spite of handicaps his output was fairly steady throughout, and his most richly productive period—1847–1863—half overlapped his Harvard service. Aside from his fruitful activities in formulating books and methods for language study, and aside from his unimpressive prose volumes “Outre-Mer,” “Hyperion,” and “Kavanagh,” his poetry was abundant and in a way progressive. Most memorable among the early types was a sizeable group to which he referred in his diary and letters as “psalms.” Of these, of course, “A Psalm of Life” is best known. Like all the others of its sort, it has the traits that are sure to endear it to the multitude. It is in a conventional ballad meter, alternating lines of four and three stresses with alternating rimes, it is easy to understand, it is constructed around one vivid picture, and it conveys a wholesome moral lesson. It is a general counsel to industry and fortitude. Its message is formulated in a closing stanza of “The Light of Stars,”