More swift its bolt than lightning is, To all, and leave me single in the crowd. 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, 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, My memory I'll educate To know the one historic truth, Remembering to the latest date The only true and sole immortal youth. 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 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, Who gently tempers now his heats, A sober mind will walk alone, Sometimes a late autumnal thought 80 1849, 1895 5 ΙΟ 15 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 4. This serene and genuinely inspired 20 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, There lurks a small auxiliar to the night. I hear the cricket's slumbrous lay But most he chirps beneath the sod, Small birds, in fleets migrating by, With faint and hurried click beguile the way. Far in the woods, these golden days, And through their hollow aisles it plays Gently withdrawing from its stem, Where the same hand hath pillowed them, The loneliest birch is brown and sere, The jay screams through the chestnut wood; Are hue and texture of my mood And these rough burrs my heirlooms on the ground. The threadbare trees, so poor and thin- But with as brave a core within They rear their boughs to the October sky. Poor knights they are which bravely wait 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 |