From 1854 until 1861 he lived in reality the ideal existence of his youthful dreams. In 1861 his wife's summer dress caught fire, and although he struggled heroically to save her, she died the next day, and he himself was so severely burned that he could not attend her funeral. Years afterwards he wrote:—
"Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose."
Like Bryant, he sought refuge in translating. Longfellow chose Dante, and gave the world the fine rendering of his Divine Comedy (1867).
Outside of these domestic sorrows, Longfellow's life was happy and prosperous. His home was blessed with attractive children. Loved by friends, honored by foreigners, possessed of rare sweetness and lovableness of disposition, he became the most popular literary man in America. He desired freedom from turmoil and from constant struggling for daily bread, and this freedom came to him in fuller measure than to most men.
The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The
public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday,
February 27, 1882. Less than a month later he died, and was laid to rest in
Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge.
[Illustration: LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN]
"LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."—"God must love the common people," said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more attractive, more easily borne, more important, more full of meaning.
In his first published volume of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), he shows his aim distinctly in such poems as A Psalm of Life. Its lines are the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and noble purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning
"Life is real! Life is earnest,"
and