The death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made the first breach in that well-known group of poets which adorned Boston and its vicinity so long. The first to go was also the most widely famous. Emerson reached greater depths of thought; Whittier touched the problems of the nation’s life more deeply; Holmes came personally more before the public; Lowell was more brilliant and varied; but, taking the English-speaking world at large, it was Longfellow whose fame overshadowed all the others; he was also better known and more translated upon the continent of Europe than all the rest put together, and, indeed, than any other contemporary poet of the English-speaking race, at least if bibliographies afford any test. Add to this that his place of residence was so accessible and so historic, his 2 personal demeanor so kindly, his life so open and transparent, that everything really conspired to give him the highest accessible degree of contemporary fame. There was no literary laurel that was not his, and he resolutely declined all other laurels; he had wealth and ease, children and grandchildren, health and a stainless conscience; he had also, in a peculiar degree, the blessings that belong to Shakespeare’s estimate of old age,—“honor, love, obedience, troops of friends.” Except for two great domestic bereavements, his life would have been one of absolutely unbroken sunshine; in his whole career he never encountered any serious rebuff, while such were his personal modesty and kindliness that no one could long regard him with envy or antagonism. Among all the sons of song there has rarely been such an instance of unbroken and unstained success.
Yet the fact that his death took place twenty years ago may justly raise the question how far this wave of success has followed his memory, or how far the passage of time has impaired his traditional influence; and here we must compare a variety of tests and standards to ascertain the result. Some analysis of this kind may well precede any new attempt to delineate his career.
The editor of one of the great London weeklies said to an American traveller not many years 3 ago, “A stranger can hardly have an idea of how familiar many of our working people, especially women, are with Longfellow. Thousands can repeat some of his poems who have never read a line of Tennyson and probably never heard of Browning.” This passage I take from an admirable recent sketch by Professor Edwin A. Grosvenor of Amherst College, one of the most cosmopolitan of Americans, who spent seven years as professor of history at Robert College, Constantinople. He goes on to tell how, in the largest private library in the Ottoman Empire, the grand vizier showed him as his favorite book a large volume of Longfellow, full of manuscript comments in Turkish on the margin, adding that he knew some of the poems by heart. Professor Grosvenor was at one time—in 1879—travelling by steamer from Constantinople to Marseilles with a Russian lady who had been placed under his escort, and whose nationality could have been detected only by her marvellous knowledge of half a dozen languages beside her own. A party of passengers had been talking in French of Victor Hugo, when the Russian lady exclaimed in English to the last speaker, “How can you, an American, give to him the place that is occupied by your own Longfellow? Longfellow is the universal poet. He is better known, too, among foreigners, than 4 any one except their own poets!” She then repeated the verses beginning, “I stood on the bridge at midnight,” and added, “I long to visit Boston, that I may stand on the bridge.” Then an English captain, returning from the Zulu war, said, “I can give you something better than that,” and recited in a voice like a trumpet,—
“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream.”
Presently a gray-haired Scotchman began to recite the poem,—
“There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!”
An American contributed “My Lost Youth,” being followed by a young Greek temporarily living in England, who sang “Stars of the Summer Night.” Finally the captain of the steamer, an officer of the French navy detailed for that purpose, whom nobody had suspected of knowing a word of English, recited, in an accent hardly recognizable, the first verse of “Excelsior,” and when the Russian lady, unable to understand him, denied the fact of its being English at all, he replied, “Ah, oui, madame, ça a vient de votre Longfellow” (Yes, madam, that is from your Longfellow). Six nationalities had thus been represented, and the Russian lady said, as they rose from the table, “Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, 5 from whom so many of us could have quoted? Not one. Not even Shakespeare, or Victor Hugo, or Homer.”[1]
One has merely to glance at any detailed catalogue of the translations from Longfellow’s works—as for instance that given in the appendix to this volume—to measure the vast extent of his fame. The list includes thirty-five versions of whole books or detached poems in German, twelve in Italian, nine each in French and Dutch, seven in Swedish, six in Danish, five in Polish, three in Portuguese, two each in Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, and Bohemian, with single translations in Latin, Hebrew, Chinese, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Judea-German—yielding one hundred versions altogether, extending into eighteen languages, apart from the original English. There is no evidence that any other English-speaking poet of the last century has been so widely appreciated.