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More swift its bolt than lightning is,
Its voice than thunder is more loud,
It doth expand my privacies

To all, and leave me single in the crowd.

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Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid,

The star that guides our mortal course, Which shows where life's true kernel's laid, Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.

She with one breath attunes the spheres,
And also my poor human heart,

With one impulse propels the years

Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start.

I will not doubt for evermore,

Nor falter from a steadfast faith,

For though the system be turned o'er,

God takes not back the word which once He saith.

I will not doubt the love untold

Which not my worth nor want has bought,

Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.

My memory I'll educate

To know the one historic truth, Remembering to the latest date

The only true and sole immortal youth.

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Be but thy inspiration given,

No matter through what danger sought,

I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,

And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought.

Fame cannot tempt the bard

Who's famous with his God,

Nor laurel him reward

Who has his Maker's nod.

1848

The Fall of the Leaf1

Thank God who seasons thus the year,
And sometimes kindly slants his rays;
For in his winter he's most near
And plainest seen upon the shortest days.

Who gently tempers now his heats,
And then his harsher cold, lest we
Should surfeit on the summer's sweets,
Or pine upon the winter's crudity.

A sober mind will walk alone,
Apart from nature, if need be,
And only its own seasons own;
For nature leaving its humanity.

Sometimes a late autumnal thought
Has crossed my mind in green July,
And to its early freshness brought

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1849, 1895

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ΙΟ

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Late ripened fruits, and an autumnal sky.

The evening of the year draws on,

The fields a later aspect wear;

Since Summer's garishness is gone,

Some grains of night tincture the noontide air.

Behold! the shadows of the trees
Now circle wider 'bout their stem,
Like sentries that by slow degrees
Perform their rounds, gently protecting them.

4. This serene and genuinely inspired
poem of reflection, notable among Tho-
reau's poems for its unity of mood and
form, was actually dismembered in its
first publication, in the Boston Com-
monwealth in 1863. In the issue for Oc-
tober 9, stanzas 5-13 appeared as "The
Fall of the Leaf." Nearly a month later,

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on November 6, the first four stanzas were printed as "The Soul's Season," but the Commonwealth did not print the last three stanzas of the present version. The entire sixteen stanzas appeared in Poems of Nature (1895), whose editor had access to a manuscript which has not been recovered.

And as the year doth decline,
The sun allows a scantier light;
Behind each needle of the pine

There lurks a small auxiliar to the night.

I hear the cricket's slumbrous lay
Around, beneath me, and on high;
It rocks the night, it soothes the day,
And everywhere is Nature's lullaby.

But most he chirps beneath the sod,
When he has made his winter bed;
His creak grown fainter but more broad,
A film of autumn o'er the summer spread.

Small birds, in fleets migrating by,
Now beat across some meadow's bay,
And as they tack and veer on high,

With faint and hurried click beguile the way.

Far in the woods, these golden days,
Some leaf obeys its Maker's call;

And through their hollow aisles it plays
With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall.

Gently withdrawing from its stem,
It lightly lays itself along

Where the same hand hath pillowed them,
Resigned to sleep upon the old year's throng.

The loneliest birch is brown and sere,
The furthest pool is strewn with leaves,
Which float upon their watery bier,
Which is no eye that sees, no heart that grieves.

The jay screams through the chestnut wood;
The crisped and yellow leaves around

Are hue and texture of my mood

And these rough burrs my heirlooms on the ground.

The threadbare trees, so poor and thin-
They are no wealthier than I;

But with as brave a core within

They rear their boughs to the October sky.

Poor knights they are which bravely wait
The charge of Winter's cavalry,
Keeping a simple Roman state,
Discumbered of their Persian luxury.

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1863, 1895

The Humanitarian and

Critical Temper

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

(1807-1882)

Longfellow was one of the most serious writers of his age, and although a poet, enormously popular. He combined considerable learning with an enlightened understanding of the people, and he expressed the lives and ideals of humbler Americans in poems that they could not forget. Amid the rising democracy of his day, Longfellow became the national bard. His more popular poems strongly reflected the optimistic sentiment and the love of a good lesson that characterized the humanitarian spirit of the people. Unfortunately for his reputation in the twentieth century, the surviving picture has been that of the gray old poet of "The Children's Hour," seated by the fireside in the armchair made from "the spreading chestnut tree," a present from the children of Cambridge. Recent criticism has again emphasized the other Longfellow, well known to more discerning readers of his own day as the poet of "The Saga of King Olaf" and Christus, the

the other

author of great ballads and of many sonnets and reflective lyrics remarkable for imaginative propriety and constructive skill. To be sure, the familiar spirit is always present in his work, and this is not the tradition admired today, but it too contributes to what in his writing is genuine, large, and enduring.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807, into a family of established tradition and moderate means. He attended Portland Academy and was tutored for admission to nearby Bowdoin College, which he entered in the sophomore class, a fellow student of Hawthorne. Having published his first poem at thirteen, two years earlier, he dreamed of "future eminence in literature." Upon his graduation in 1825, he accepted a professorship of foreign languages at Bowdoin, which included a provision for further preparatory study abroad. He visited France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, returning to Bowdoin in the autumn of 1829.

There he taught for six years, edited textbooks, and wrote articles on European literatures in the tradition of his profession. His reward was the offer of the Smith professorship at Harvard, which George Ticknor was vacating; and a leave of absence for further study of German. Meanwhile he had married

(1831), and published in the New England Magazine the travel sketches which appeared as his first volume, Outre Mer, in 1835. The twenty months abroad (1835-1836), increased Longfellow's knowledge of Germanic and Scandinavian literatures, soon to become a deep influence upon his writing.

His young wife died during the journey, in November, 1835. With renewed dedication to the combined responsibilities of teacher and creative writer, at the dawn of the well-named "flowering of New England," Longfellow soon became a leading figure among the writers and scholars of that region. Hawthorne was now an intimate friend. Within three years he entered upon the decade of remarkable production (18391849) which gave him national prominence and the affection of his countrymen.

Hyperion, a prose romance, and Voices of the Night, his first collection of poems, both appeared in 1839. Ballads and Other Poems (December, 1841, dated 1842), containing "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," and "The Village Blacksmith," exactly expressed the popular spirit of the day. Poems on Slavery (1842) was followed by The

Spanish Student (1843), his first large treatment of a foreign theme.

Of more importance was The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845, dated 1846). Such poems as "Nuremberg" illustrate how the poet familiarized untraveled Americans with the European scene and culture. At the same time he was acquainting his countrymen with themselves in such poems as "The Arsenal at Springfield," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," and "The Arrow and the Song." His contribution to the epic of his country found its first large expression in Evangeline (1847), which aroused national enthusiasm for its pictorial vividness and narrative skill. The Seaside and the Fireside (1849, dated 1850) contained "The Building of the Ship," a powerful plea for national unity in the face of the mounting crises before the Civil War. Minor works of this period include a prose tale, Kavanagh (1849), and several anthologies of poetry and criticism.

After two decades of conflict between the writer and the teacher, he resigned his Harvard professorship to James Russell Lowell in 1854. But Craigie House, his home in Cambridge, remained no less a sort of literary capitol. Longfellow had lodged there on first going to Harvard, and it became his as a gift from Nathan Appleton, the Lowell industrialist whose daughter the poet had married in 1843.

In 1855, he published The Song of Hiawatha, based on American Indian legends, and

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