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WRITTEN AT BOPPARD ON THE RHINE AUGUST 25, 1842, just

BEFORE LEAVING FOR HOME

Half of my life is gone, and I have let

The years slip from me and have not fulfilled

The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.

Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret

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Of restless passions that would not be stilled,

But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,1

Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;

Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past

Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—
A city in the twilight dim and vast,

With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,-
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
1842

9. Among Longfellow's sonnets, this is
notable for the effective irregularity of
its extended last line. The words of the
title appear in the first line of Dante's
Divine Comedy: Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita, translated, "Midway
upon the journey of our life." Like
Dante when he wrote these lines, Long-

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[1845] 1846

fellow had reached the mid-point of the biblical three score and ten years. The poem was collected in The Belfry of Bruges, dated 1846, but published on December 23, 1845.

1. Longfellow's first wife had died in 1835, during his previous trip abroad.

The Arsenal at Springfield2

This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms.

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere3

Will mingle with their awful symphonies!

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,

Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer,
Through Cimbric1 forest roars the Norseman's song,
And loud, amid the universal clamor,

O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace
Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din,
And Aztec priests upon their teocallis

Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin;
The tumult of each sacked and burning village;
The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns;
The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage;
The wail of famine in beleaguered towns;

The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder,
The rattling musketry, the clashing blade;
And ever and anon, in tones of thunder,
The diapason of the cannonade.

Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,
With such accursed instruments as these,

2. Longfellow and his second wife on
their wedding journey in 1843 visited
Springfield, Massachusetts, where the
rows of guns on the walls of the arsenal
suggested to the bride the organ pipes.
of death. The first International Peace
Conference was meeting in London that
year, and the next, 1844, saw the birth
af the Christian Citizen, the first periodi-
cal devoted to the cause of peace. Long-
fellow responded with this poem in
Graham's Magazine, April, 1844, and

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the next year collected it in The Belfry of Bruges.

3. A lyrical supplication for mercy; specifically, the first line of Psalm L, in the Latin Vulgate, used in the Catholic service: Miserere mei Domine ("Have mercy on me, Lord").

4. The Cimbri, originally Danish, long opposed the Roman Empire.

5. Places of worship of Mexican and Central American Indians, the temple surmounting a truncated pyramidal mound.

1844

Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices,
And jarrest the celestial harmonies?

Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,

There were no need of arsenals or forts:

The warrior's name would be a name abhorrèd!
And every nation, that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain!

Down the dark future, through long generations,

The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease;
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,

I hear once more the voice of Christ say, "Peace!"

Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals

The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,

The holy melodies of love arise.

Nuremberg

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1844, [1845] 1846

In the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands.

Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng:

Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold,

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Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old; And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme, That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime.8

6. In "Nuremberg," and many other poems, Longfellow the teacher communicated his enthusiasm for the culture of the past to a middle-class audience largely untraveled. However, although he here recalls the romantic history of a medieval cathedral city, he emphasizes its democratic tradition, and, in the last line, reflects a dominant American attitude. The poem, inspired by the poet's visit in 1842, was written in 1844, appearing in Graham's Maga

zine in June, and in The Belfry of Bruges the following year.

7. Nuremberg became a free imperial city in 1219, and for more than four hundred years its princes fostered traditions of freedom, providing a German Gothic Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a favorable soil for the Protestant Reformation of Luther (1483-1546).

8. Paraphrase of an ancient German proverb.

In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band,
Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand;

On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days
Sat the poet Melchior1 singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise,
Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of Art:
Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common
mart;

And above the cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone,

By a former age commissioned as apostles to our own.

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In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust, And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust;2

In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare, Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted

air.

Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,
Lived and labored Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art;4
Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand,
Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land.
Emigravits is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies;
Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies.
Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,
That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its
air!

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Through these streets so broad and stately, these obscure and dismal

lanes,

Walked of yore the Mastersingers,

9. Kunigunde (died about 1039), wife of Henry II. She repudiated false charges by walking barefoot over hot irons, and was canonized as a saint in 1200.

1. "Melchior Pfinzing was one of the most celebrated German poets of the sixteenth century. The hero of his Tenerdank was the reigning Emperor, Maximilian ✶✶ ✶” [Longfellow's note].

2. "The tomb of Saint Sebald, in the church which bears his name, is one of the richest works of art in Nuremberg. It is of bronze, and was cast by Peter Vischer and his sons, who labored upon it thirteen years. It is adorned with nearly one hundred figures, among which those of the Twelve Apostles are conspicuous for size and beauty" [Long

chanting rude poetic strains.

fellow's note].

3. St. Lawrence Justinian (1381-1456), author of the constitution of the Augustinians, an order of monks whose large German following included Luther. In his note, Longfellow describes the "pix" of this church as "a tabernacle for vessels of the sacrament, ✶ ✶ ✶ an exquisite sculpture of white stone," sixtyfour feet high, reflecting the rich colors of the choir windows.

4. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), most celebrated painter of the German Renaissance, inventor of etching, and an "Evangelist" because of his magnificent woodcuts of biblical subjects, still treasured in old German Bibles.

5. He has gone forth.

6. Meistersingers; guilds of musicians and poets, chiefly from the artisan class,

From remote and sunless suburbs came they to the friendly guild, Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in spouts the swallows build.

As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme, And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime;

Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of

bloom

In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom.

poesy

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Here Hans Sachs," the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft, Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed.

But his house is now an ale-house, with a nicely sanded floor, And a garland in the window, and his face above the door;

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Painted by some humble artist, as in Adam Puschman's song, As the old man gray and dove-like, with his great beard white and long.

And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care,
Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair.

Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my dreamy eye
Wave these mingled shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry.

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Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard; But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs thy cobbler bard.

Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away,

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As he paced thy streets and court-yards, sang in thought his careless lay: Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil, The nobility of labor,-the long pedigree of toil. 1844

1844, [1845] 1846

which flourished in various German cities from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. That at Nuremberg, the most renowned, included Hans Sachs (cf. 1. 37, below).

7. Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremberg, the most talented of the Meistersingers, was also a shoemaker ("the gentle craft"); Wagner later made him the central figure in the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1867).

8. "The Twelve Wise Masters was the title of the original corporation of the Mastersingers. Hans Sachs, *** though not one of the original Twelve, was the most renowned of the Mastersingers" [Longfellow's note].

9. In his note, Longfellow translates some lines from this obscure German poet as the source of his description of Sachs, below.

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