In 1841, consequently, there appeared his “Ballads and Other Poems.” Longfellow had first intended calling the volume “The Skeleton in Armor,” but the collection grew in number until this poem was overbalanced by the weight of the whole, and until—which is more significant—the native ballads were crowded by the introduction of poems from the German and Swedish and Danish. The change of plan, though slight, was indicative of what was taking place in Longfellow’s development. He inclined, in the fashion of his day, to foster American subject matter, but he was full of the spirit and content of European literature which was unknown to his countrymen. Some years were to pass before he could hold his gaze away from “outre-mer.” Another letter to George Greene shows how he was vacillating at this time.
A national literature is the expression of national character and thought; and as our character and modes of thought do not differ essentially from those of England, our literature cannot. Vast fields, lakes and prairies cannot make great poets. They are but the scenery of the play, and have much less to do with the poetic character than has been imagined.... I do not think a “Poets’ Convention” would help the matter. In fact the matter needs no helping.
“Excelsior” is a complete poetic fulfillment of this idea. There is nothing essentially American in the aspiration of youth. Longfellow therefore “staged” the ballad in the Alps, partly because the Alps doubtless first occurred to mind and partly because in America no mountain heights were topped by the symbolic monastery from which the traveler could be found still aspiring in death. Again, lyrics like “The Day is Done,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” and “The Arrow and the Song” belong to no time or place but are meditative moments in the life of any thoughtful man. And finally, “The Bridge” is a representative combination of native and foreign material. The bridge with wooden piers used to stand exactly as described over the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. It was so near the ocean that the tides swept back and forth under it as they do not under any bridge in London or Paris or on the German Rhine. Yet in the second stanza the likeness of the moonlight to “a golden goblet falling and sinking into the sea” is evidently an allusion to a picture in Schiller’s “König von Thule,” a literary allusion but not a false one, for the moonlight might well look the same on the tide-tossed Charles as on the streaming Rhine. In his “Seaweed” Longfellow seems to have been half explaining and half defending such poetic processes:
So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean
Of the poet’s soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song.
The one point to accept with caution from all Longfellow’s poems of self-analysis is the oft-recurring reference to heroic strife. Whatever heroism he felt or displayed “in the world’s broad field of battle” was more quietly enduring than spectacular. The real Longfellow learned “to labor and to wait”; if wild emotion ever struck the ocean of his soul he possessed himself for the tumult to subside. The finest of all his lyrics, “Victor and Vanquished,” cannot be confirmed from the visible evidences of his career. The “Poems on Slavery,” for example, attest only to the passive courage of his convictions. In 1842 it was no small matter to come out clearly in public opposition to human bondage (see p. 257). Longfellow did not hesitate to risk his growing popularity by issuing this little volume. He was, and he continued to be, the devoted friend of Charles Sumner. Yet his antislavery heroism began and ended with these seven poems, and their value lay more in the bare fact that he had written them than in any ethical or emotional appeal.