And thou, too, whosoe’er thou art,
That readest this brief psalm,
As one by one thy hopes depart,
Be resolute and calm,
and its “act in the living present” is echoed in the daily achievement of the village blacksmith.
Longfellow’s labors as a translator began early and continued throughout his career, but it is interesting to see that in the earlier efforts a sober ethical note prevails, whereas many of the later translations are marked by simple charm and some by sheer frivolity. “The Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique” is a transparently veiled homily on the vanity of human wishes; others from the Spanish are on “The Good Shepherd” and “The Image of God” and from Dante on “The Celestial Pilot” and “The Terrestrial Paradise”; there is an Anglo-Saxon passage on “The Grave” and a fragment from a German ballad in which a ribald discussion of “The Happiest Land” is interrupted by the landlord’s daughter who points to heaven and says:
... “Ye may no more contend,—
There lies the happiest land!”
In January, 1840, the poet wrote to his friend George Greene:
I have broken ground in a new field; namely, ballads; beginning with the “Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus” on the reef of Norman’s Woe.... I think I shall write more. The national ballad is a virgin soil here in New England; and there are great materials. Besides, I have a great notion of working on the people’s feelings.