N an old square wooden house upon the edge of the sea” the most famous and most widely read of all American poets was born in Portland, Maine, February 7th, 1807.
In his personality, his wide range of themes, his learning and his wonderful power of telling stories in song, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stood in his day and still stands easily in front of all other poets who have enriched American literature. Admitting that he was not rugged and elemental like Bryant and did not possess the latter’s feelings for the colossal features of wild scenery, that he was not profoundly thoughtful and transcendental like Emerson, that he was not so earnestly and passionately sympathetic as Whittier, nevertheless he was our first artist in poetry. Bryant, Emerson and Whittier commanded but a few stops of the grand instrument upon which they played; Longfellow understood perfectly all its capabilities. Critics also say that “he had not the high ideality or dramatic power of Tennyson or Browning.” But does he not hold something else which to the world at large is perhaps more valuable? Certainly these two great poets are inferior to him in the power to sweep the chords of daily human experiences and call forth the sweetness and beauty in common-place every day human life. It is on these themes that he tuned his harp without ever a false tone, and sang with a harmony so well nigh perfect that the universal heart responded to his music. This common-place song has found a lodgement in every household in America, “swaying the hearts of men and women whose sorrows have been soothed and whose lives raised by his gentle verse.”
“Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.”
Longfellow’s life from the very beginning moved on even lines. Both he and William Cullen Bryant were descendants of John Alden, whom Longfellow has made famous in “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” The Longfellows were a family in comfortable circumstances, peaceful and honest, for many generations back. The poet went to school with Nathaniel P. Willis and other boys who at an early age were thinking more of verse making than of pleasure. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825 with Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S. C. Abbott, and others who afterwards attained to fame. Almost immediately after his graduation he was requested to take the chair of Modern Languages and Literature in his alma mater, which he accepted; but before entering upon his duties spent three years in Germany, France, Spain and Italy to further perfect himself in the languages and literature of those nations. At Bowdoin College Longfellow remained as Professor of Modern Languages and Literature until 1835, when he accepted a similar position in Harvard University, which he continued to occupy until 1854, when he resigned, devoting the remainder of his life to literary work and to the enjoyment of the association of such friends as Charles Sumner the statesman, Hawthorne the romancer, Louis Agassiz the great naturalist, and James Russell Lowell, the brother poet who succeeded to the chair of Longfellow in Harvard University on the latter’s resignation.
The home of Longfellow was not only a delightful place to visit on account of the cordial welcome extended by the companionable poet, but for its historic associations as well; for it was none other than the old “Cragie House” which had been Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, the past tradition and recent hospitality of which have been well told by G. W. Curtis in his “Homes of American Authors.” It was here that Longfellow surrounded himself with a magnificent library, and within these walls he composed all of his famous productions from 1839 until his death, which occurred there in 1882 at the age of seventy-five. The poet was twice married and was one of the most domestic of men. His first wife died suddenly in Europe during their sojourn in that country while Longfellow was pursuing his post graduate course of study before taking the chair in Bowdoin College. In 1843 he married Miss Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Europe and who figures in the pages of his romance “Hyperion.” In 1861 she met a most tragic death by stepping on a match which set fire to her clothing, causing injuries from which she died. She was buried on the 19th anniversary of their marriage. By Longfellow’s own direction she was crowned with a wreath of orange blossoms commemorative of the day. The poet was so stricken with grief that for a year afterwards he did practically no work, and it is said neither in conversation nor in writing to his most intimate friends could he bear to refer to the sad event.
Longfellow was one of the most bookish men in our literature. His knowledge of others’ thoughts and writings was so great that he became, instead of a creator in his poems, a painter of things already created. It is said that he never even owned a style of his own like Bryant and Poe, but assimilated what he saw or heard or read from books, reclothing it and sending it out again. This does not intimate that he was a plagiarist, but that he wrote out of the accumulated knowledge of others. “Evangeline,” for instance, was given him by Hawthorne, who had heard of the young people of Acadia and kept them in mind, intending to weave them into a romance. The forcible deportation of 18,000 French people touched Hawthorne as it perhaps never could have touched Longfellow except in literature, and also as it certainly never would have touched the world had not Longfellow woven the woof of the story in the threads of his song.
“Evangeline” was brought out the same year with Tennyson’s “Princess” (1847), and divided honors with the latter even in England. In this poem, and in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” and other poems, the pictures of the new world are brought out with charming simplicity. Though Longfellow never visited Acadia or Louisiana, it is the real French village of Grand Pré and the real Louisiana, not a poetic dream that are described in this poem. So vivid were his descriptions that artists in Europe painted the scenes true to nature and vied with each other in painting the portrait of Evangeline, among several of which there is said to be so striking a resemblance as to suggest the idea that one had served as a copy for the others. The poem took such a hold upon the public, that both the poor man and the rich knew Longfellow as they knew not Tennyson their own poet. It was doubtless because he, though one of the most scholarly of men, always spoke so the plainest reader could understand.