It will perhaps be found, as time goes on, that the greatest service rendered by Longfellow—beyond all personal awakening or stimulus exerted on his readers—was that of being the first conspicuous representative, in an eminently practical and hard-working community, of the literary life. One of a circle of superior men, he was the only one who stood for that life purely and supremely, and thus vindicated its national importance. Among his predecessors, Irving had lived chiefly in Europe, and Bryant in a newspaper office. Among his immediate friends, Holmes stood for exact science, Lowell and Whittier for reform, Sumner for statesmanship, Emerson for spiritual and mystic values; even the shy Hawthorne for public functions at home and abroad. Here was a man whose single word, sent forth from his quiet study, reached more hearts in distant nations than any of these, and was speedily reproduced in the far-off languages of the world. Considered merely as an antidote to materialism, such a life was of incalculable 295 value. Looking at him, the reign of the purely materialistic, however much aided by organizing genius, was plainly self-limited; the modest career of Longfellow outshone it in the world’s arena. Should that reign henceforth grow never so potent, the best offset to its most arrogant claims will be found, for years to come, in the memory of his name.
[106] The Home Circle, London, October, 1850, iii. 249.
[107] My Reminiscences, by Lord Ronald Gower, American edition, ii. 227, 228.
[108] Ib., American edition, ii. 228.
APPENDIX
I
GENEALOGY
[From Life, etc., by Samuel Longfellow, iii. 421.]
The name of Longfellow is found in the records of Yorkshire, England, as far back as 1486, and appears under the various spellings of Langfellay, Langfellowe, Langfellow, and Longfellow. The first of the name is James Langfellay, of Otley. In 1510 Sir Peter Langfellowe is vicar of Calverley. In the neighboring towns of Ilkley, Guiseley, and Horsforth lived many Longfellows, mostly yeomen: some of them well-to-do, others a charge on the parish; some getting into the courts and fined for such offences as “cutting green wode,” or “greenhow,” or “carrying away the Lord’s wood,”—wood from the yew-trees of the lord of the manor, to which they thought they had a right for their bows. One of the name was overseer of highways, and one was churchwarden in Ilkley.
It is well established, by tradition and by documents, that the poet’s ancestors were in Horsforth. In 1625 we find Edward Longfellow (perhaps from Ilkley) purchasing “Upper House,” in Horsforth; and in 1647 he makes over his house and lands to 298 his son William. This William was a well-to-do clothier who lived in Upper House, and, besides, possessed three other houses or cottages (being taxed for “4 hearths”), with gardens, closes, crofts, etc. He had two sons, Nathan and William, and four or five daughters. William was baptized at Guiseley (the parish church of Horsforth), October 20, 1650.
The first of the name in America was this William, son of William of Horsforth. He came over, a young man, to Newbury, Massachusetts, about 1676. Soon after, he married Anne Sewall, daughter of Henry Sewall, of Newbury, and sister of Samuel Sewall, afterward the first chief justice of Massachusetts. He received from his father-in-law a farm in the parish of Byfield, on the Parker River.[109] He is spoken of as “well educated, but a little wild,” or, as another puts it, “not so much of a Puritan as some.” In 1690, as ensign of the Newbury company in the Essex regiment, he joined the ill-fated expedition of Sir William Phipps against Quebec, which on its return encountered a severe storm in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. One of the ships was wrecked on the island of Anticosti, and William Longfellow, 299 with nine of his comrades, was drowned. He left five children. The fourth of these, Stephen (1), left to shift for himself, became a blacksmith. He married Abigail, daughter of Rev. Edward Tompson, of Newbury, afterward of Marshfield. Their fifth child, Stephen (2), born in 1723, being a bright boy, was sent to Harvard College, where he took his first degree in 1742, and his second in 1745. In this latter year (after having meanwhile taught a school in York) he went to Portland in Maine (then Falmouth), to be the schoolmaster of the town.[110]