XI
MODERN BOYS AND GIRLS WHO BECAME USEFUL

(Adapted for Young People, Nine to Eighteen Years.)

1. LONGFELLOW, POET

The poet, Longfellow, once wrote in his diary, “We have but one life to live on earth; we must make that beautiful.” The story of this beautiful life began at his birth in Portland, Me., February 27, 1807. He was the second of eight children. His father was an honored lawyer and his mother was a woman of refinement, a descendant of John Alden of the Mayflower. Henry was a noble, tender-hearted boy. One day when he went shooting, he killed a robin. The piteous look of the little fearless thing so pained him that he never went shooting again. The first book he loved was Irving’s “Sketch-Book.” Its strange stories of “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” pleased his fancy. During each summer he used to visit his Grandfather Wadsworth’s estate of seven thousand acres, just outside Portland, where they told him tales of ’76. The story of the fight with the Indians impressed him so deeply that at the age of thirteen he wrote his first poem, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” which he slipped into an envelope and mailed to a newspaper, telling no one but his sister. He walked up and down in front of the printing-office, shivering in the cold, and wondering if his poem was being put in print. Next morning there was the poem, signed “Henry.” He read it again and again, and thought it a fine poem. In the evening he and his father were visiting at a neighbor’s house, when the neighbor said to Mr. Longfellow, “Did you see the little poem in to-day’s paper?” “No,” said Mr. Longfellow, “is it good for anything?” “No,” said the neighbor, “it’s stiff, and it’s all borrowed, every word; why, your boy there could write much better than that!” Poor Henry’s heart sank. He hurried home and sobbed himself to sleep that night. Yet criticism did not discourage this brave boy. He kept trying, saying, “I will succeed,” and he became the best-loved poet of the world. At fourteen he graduated from Portland Academy, and at eighteen from Bowdoin College. After three years’ travel in Europe, he became professor of modern languages in his alma mater for five years, and then for eighteen years professor of literature in Harvard, being succeeded by James Russell Lowell. The school children of Cambridge celebrated his seventy-second birthday by presenting him with a chair carved from the wood of the chestnut tree under which stood the village smithy that he made famous in his poem, “The Village Blacksmith.” The poet greatly appreciated this gift, and wrote one of his best poems about it. Each boy and girl who came was allowed to sit in the chair and each received a copy of a poem that Longfellow wrote. The same year fifteen hundred children of Cincinnati celebrated his birthday with recitations from his poems and singing his songs. His marble statue stands in the “Poet’s Corner,” in Westminster Abbey in London, England. His grave is in Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge. On his tombstone is the simple inscription: “Longfellow.” That is enough. There are few schoolboys in America or England who do not know the story of his beautiful life, or who have not recited his words in “A Psalm of Life”:

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time—