MEMOIR.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born at Portland, Maine, on the 27th of February, 1807. His father, Mr. Stephen Longfellow, a native of Gorham, Maine, then a District of Massachusetts, was a descendant of William Longfellow, of Newbury, in the same state, who was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1651, and emigrated to America in early youth. He married Miss Anne Sewell, and after a married life of fourteen years was drowned at Anticosti, a large desert island in the estuary of the St. Lawrence. Mr. Stephen Longfellow, a descendant in the fourth generation of this gentleman, was born in the year in which the colonies declared their independence of the mother country. He graduated at Harvard College in his twenty-second year, and devoted himself to the law, removing to Portland at the beginning of the present century. He was a good jurist, as the Massachusetts and Maine Reports testify, and was a member of the national Congress when it was an honour to belong to that body. He was also the president of the Maine Historical Society. He was the father of our poet, whose mother was a descendant of John Alden; who must have been a prolific old Puritan, for his descendants have produced two American poets, William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

When Mr. Longfellow shall have joined the Immortals, and his hiography shall be written in full, students of his poetry will know more of his childhood than his contemporaries do now. That he was thoughtfully cared for by his parents, is certain, and that his education was an excellent one, is equally certain, for he entered Bowdoin College at the

age of fourteen. It was a remarkable class in which he found himself, for it contained, among other men who have arrived at eminence in literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George B. Cheever, and J. S. C. Abbott:

and he must have distinguished himself, or he would not have received -as he did-the appointment of professor of modern languages and literatures, shortly after he graduated, in 1825. He accepted this

appointment, with the privilege of going abroad for three years, in order to qualify himself fully for his duties, and the following year saw him travelling on the Continent.

During his last years at college, the future professor of modern literature contributed in a modest way to the poetry of his native land. There was no American poet at the time worth speaking of, except Bryant; and there were no periodicals in the states, to which young aspirants could send their contributions. Attempts had been made to establish them, but without success, for they either died after a few months' struggle, or were merged in others, which were threatened with dissolution. There was in New York a "Literary Gazette" (for which Griswold says Sands wrote); then an "Atlantic Monthly"; and then the "New York Review and Athenæum Magazine," of which Bryant was the first editor. This became, by the process of merging, the "New York Literary Gazette and American Athenæum,” which culminated in the "United States Literary Gazette." It was in the pages of this last publication, which was issued simultaneously in New York and Boston, that the early poems of the young Bowdoin student were given to the world.

With rare exceptions, early poems are imitative, either of one or more poets whom their writers have read and admired, or of what is most marked in the poetry of the period. A careful reading of the "United States Literary Gazette" would show, I have no doubt, that Mr. Longfellow was not the only American singer, young and old, whose work bore the impress of the Author of "Thanatopsis." It is legible in "Autumn," "Sunrise on the Hills," and "The Spirit of Poetry" (I am writing of Mr. Longfellow's early poems), and it is present, in suggestion, in "An April Day," "Woods in Winter," and "The Burial of the Minnesink." Description of nature is the motive of these pieces, which are written from books rather than from observation. They show an apt ear for versification, and a sensitive temperament, which makes its own individuality felt in the midst of alien poetic influences. Clearly, a new poet had appeared in the "United States Literary Gazette."

European travel was not common among Americans fifty years ago; nor were the places to be visited always determined beforehand. A certain amount of originality was allowed to the tourist, and if he wrote

a book about what he saw it was not expected that he should cram it with information. He could be desultory, scholarly, whimsical,—he might even be a little dull: what was wanted were his impressions. The time allotted to Mr. Longfellow by his alma mater was passed in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Holland, and England. We have glimpses of what he saw in the first three of these countries, and, in a measure, of his studies and meditations therein. He has not enabled us to follow his itinerary with any certainty.

Mr. Longfellow returned to America, and to his duties at Brunswick, and took to himself a wife in his twenty-fourth year.

His first volume, which was published in Boston, in his twenty-sixth year (1833), is a translation of the "Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique," a thin little twelvemo of eighty-nine pages, which opens with an "Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain." This scholarly paper contains all that the average reader of forty-five years ago would care to read in regard to the comprehensive subject which it discussed. The preface briefly dismissed the original writer by saying that he followed the profession of arms, as did most Spanish poets of any eminence; that he fought beneath the banner of his father Roderigo Manrique, Conde de Parades, and Maestre de Santiago, and that he died on the field of battle near Cañavete, in the year 1479. This young soldier has rendered imperishable the memory of his father, in an ode which is a model of its kind, and which ranks among the world's great funeral hymns. It is admirably translated by Mr. Longfellow, other of whose Spanish studies follow it in the little volume of which I have spoken in the shape of seven moral and devotional sonnets; two of which are by Lope de Vega, two by Francisco de Aldana, two by Francisco de Medrano, the last, "The Brook," being by an anonymous poet. The sonnets of Medrano, "Art and Nature," and "The Two Harvests," have disappeared from the later editions of Mr. Longfellow's works, and can very well be spared.

The fruits of Mr. Longfellow's three years' residence in Europe were given to the world two years later. If Bryant had been unconsciously his model in his early poems he cannot be said to have had a model in "Outre-Mer." It has reminded certain English critics of Washington Irving; I fail to see in what respect. It is more scholarly than "The Sketch Book," and the style is sweeter and mellower than

obtains in that famous collection of papers,-the writer warbling, like Sidney, in poetic prose. France receives the largest share of his attention, and is most lovingly observed, partly for its old-fashioned picturesqueness, but more, perhaps, because it happened to hit his fancy. In the ninth chapter or section, which glances at "The Trouvères," we have the first French translations by Mr. Longfellow. One is a song in praise of "Spring" by Charles d'Orleans, the other is a copy of verses upon a sleeping child by Clotilde de Surville. They are elegantly translated, but we feel in reading them that the subtle aroma of their originals has somehow escaped. They do not suggest the fifteenth but the nineteenth century.

"Outre-Mer" is interesting to the student of American literature as an excellent example of a kind of prose-half essay and half narrative -which ranks among the things that were. It could not flourish now, nor can it flourish hereafter, but it delighted a literary and sympathetic class of readers forty years ago, to whom it was a pleasant revealment of Old World places, customs, stories, and literatures. It was quietly humorous, it was prettily pathetic, and it was pensive and poetical. Sentimental readers were attracted to the little sketch of "Jacqueline," humorous readers to "Martin Franc and the Monk of Saint Anthony," and "The Notary of Périgueux," and literary readers to "The Trouvères," "Ancient Spanish Ballads," and "The Devotional Poetry of Spain." (The last paper, by the way, was a reprint of the introduction to the "Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique.")

The publication of "Outre-Mer," and his growing reputation as a poet, pointed out Mr. Longfellow as the successor of Mr. George Ticknor, who in 1835 resigned his professorship of modern languages and literature in Harvard College. He was elected to fill the place of the erudite historian of Spanish Literature, and resigning his chair at Brunswick, he went abroad a second time in order to complete his studies in the literature of Northern Europe. He remained abroad a little over a year, passing the summer in Denmark and Sweden and the autumn and winter in Germany. The sudden death of his wife at Rotterdam arrested his travel and his studies until the following spring and summer, which were spent in the Tyrol and Switzerland. He returned to the United States in November, 1836, and entered upon his duties at Cambridge, where he has ever since resided.