Among them majestic is standing Sandalphon the angel, expanding

His pinions in nebulous bars.

And the legend, I feel, is a part
Of the hunger and thirst of the heart,,
The frenzy and fire of the brain,
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain.

FLIGHT THE SECOND

Included in the volume which contained the first series of Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

BETWEEN the dark and the daylight,

When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence :

Yet I know by their merry eyes

They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!

By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret

O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me ; They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen

In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Written February 3, 1859. "I have written," says Mr. Longfellow in a letter to Mr. Sumner, "a lyric on Italy, entitled Enceladus, from which title your imagination can construct the poem. It is not a war-song, but a kind of lament for the woes of the country. Mr. Longfellow used the money paid him for the poem, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1859, in aid of the Italian widows and the soldiers wounded in the war then going on for the deliverance of Italy from Austrian rule.

UNDER Mount Etna he lies,

It is slumber, it is not death; For he struggles at times to arise, And above him the lurid skies

Are hot with his fiery breath.

The crags are piled on his breast,

The earth is heaped on his head; But the groans of his wild unrest, Though smothered and half suppressed, Are heard, and he is not dead.

And the nations far away

Are watching with eager eyes; They talk together and say, "To-morrow, perhaps to-day, Enceladus will arise!"

And the old gods, the austere
Oppressors in their strength,
Stand aghast and white with fear
At the ominous sounds they hear,

And tremble, and mutter, "At length !"

Ah me! for the land that is sown With the harvest of despair! Where the burning cinders, blown From the lips of the overthrown Enceladus, fill the air;

The plan for a group of stories under the fiction of a company of story-tellers at an inn appears to have visited Mr. Longfellow after he had made some progress with the separate tales. The considerable collection under the title of The Saga of King Olaf was indeed written at first with the design of independent publication. Nearly two years passed before he took up the task in earnest; then, in November, 1860, "with all kinds of interruptions," he says, he wrote fifteen of the lyrics in as many days, and a few days afterward completed the whole of the Saga. Meanwhile he had written and published Paul Revere's Ride, and before the publication of his volume he had printed one of the lyrics of the Saga and The Legend of Rabbi Ben Levi. Just when he determined upon the framework of The Wayside Inn does not appear; it is quite possible that he had connected The Saga of King Olaf, which had been lying by for two or three years, with his friend Ole Bull, and that the desire to use so picturesque a figure had suggested a group of which the musician should be one. Literature had notable precedents for the general plan of a company at an inn, but whether the actual inn at Sudbury came to localize his conception, or was itself the cause of the plan, is not quite clear.

He sent the book to the printer in April, 1863, under the title of The Sudbury Tales, but in August wrote to Mr. Fields: "I am afraid we have made a mistake in calling the new volume The Sudbury Tales. Now that I see it announced I do not like the title. Sumner cries out against it and has persuaded me, as I think he will you, to come back to The Wayside Inn. Pray think as we do."

The book as originally planned consisted of the first part only, and was published November 25, 1863, in an edition of fifteen thousand copies, -an indication of the confidence which the publishers had in the poet's popularity.

The disguises of characters were so slight that readers easily recognized most of them at once, and Mr.

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN

PART FIRST

PRELUDE

THE WAYSIDE INN

ONE Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light through the
leaves

Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves
Their crimson curtains rent and thin.

As ancient is this hostelry
As any in the land may be,
Built in the old Colonial day,
When men lived in a grander way,
With ampler hospitality;

A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,

Longfellow himself never made any mystery of their identity. Just after the publication of the volume he wrote to a correspondent in England:

"The Wayside Inn has more foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English family by the name of Howe built there a country house, which has remained in the family down to the present time, the last of the race dying but two years ago. Losing their fortune, they became inn-keepers; and for a century the Red-Horse Inn has flourished, going down from father to son. The place is just as I have described it, though no longer an inn. All this will account for the landlord's coat-of-arms, and his being a justice of the peace, and his being known as the Squire,' things that must sound strange in English ears. All the characters are real. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel Edrehi, whom I have seen as I have painted him, etc., etc.'

It is easy to fill up the etc. of Mr. Longfellow's catalogue. The poet is T. W. Parsons, the translator of Dante; the Sicilian, Luigi Monti, whose name occurs often in Mr. Longfellow's Life as a familiar friend; the theologian, Professor Daniel Treadwell, a physicist of genius who had also a turn for theology; the student, Henry Ware Wales, a scholar of promise who had travelled much, who died early, and whose tastes appeared in the collection of books which he left to the library of Harvard College. This group was collected by the poet's fancy; in point of fact three of them, Parsons, Monti, and Treadwell, were wont to spend their summer months at the inn.

The form was so agreeable that it was easy to extend it afterward so as to include the tales which the poet found it in his mind to write. The Second Day was published in 1872; The Third Part formed the principal portion of Aftermath in 1873, and subsequently the three parts were brought together, into a complete vol

ume.

Now somewhat fallen to decay,
With weather-stains upon the wall,
And stairways worn, and crazy doors,
And creaking and uneven floors,
And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall.

A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills!
For there no noisy railway speeds,
Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds;
But noon and night, the panting teams
Stop under the great oaks, that throw
Tangles of light and shade below,
On roofs and doors and window-sills.
Across the road the barns display
Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay,
Through the wide doors the breezes blow,
The wattled cocks strut to and fro,
And, half effaced by rain and shine,
The Red Horse prances on the sign.
Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode
Deep silence reigned, save when a gust

Went rushing down the county road,
And skeletons of leaves, and dust,
A moment quickened by its breath,
Shuddered and danced their dance
death,

And through the ancient oaks o'erhead
Mysterious voices moaned and fled.

But from the parlor of the inn
A pleasant murmur smote the ear,
Like water rushing through a weir:
Oft interrupted by the din
Of laughter and of loud applause,
And, in each intervening pause,
The music of a violin.

The fire-light, shedding over all
The splendor of its ruddy glow,
Filled the whole parlor large and low;
It gleamed on wainscot and on wall,
It touched with more than wonted grace
Fair Princess Mary's pictured face;
It bronzed the rafters overhead,
On the old spinet's ivory keys
It played inaudible melodies,

It crowned the sombre clock with flame,
The hands, the hours, the maker's name,
And painted with a livelier red
The Landlord's coat-of-arms again;
And, flashing on the window-pane,
Emblazoned with its light and shade
The jovial rhymes, that still remain,
Writ near a century ago,
By the great Major Molineaux,
Whom Hawthorne has immortal made.

---

Before the blazing fire of wood
Erect the rapt musician stood;
And ever and anon he bent
His head upon his instrument,
And seemed to listen, till he caught
Confessions of its secret thought, -
The joy, the triumph, the lament,
The exultation and the pain;
Then, by the magic of his art,
He soothed the throbbings of its heart,
And lulled it into peace again.

Around the fireside at their ease
There sat a group of friends, entranced
With the delicious melodies;
Who from the far-off noisy town
Had to the wayside inn come down,
To rest beneath its old oak trees.
The fire-light on their faces glanced,
Their shadows on the wainscot danced,

And, though of different lands and speech,
Each had his tale to tell, and each
Was anxious to be pleased and please.
And while the sweet musician plays,
Let me in outline sketch them all,
Perchance uncouthly as the blaze
With its uncertain touch portrays
Their shadowy semblance on the wall.

But first the Landlord will I trace;
Grave in his aspect and attire ;
A man of ancient pedigree,

A Justice of the Peace was he,
Known in all Sudbury as "The Squire."
Proud was he of his name and race,
Of old Sir William and Sir Hugh,
And in the parlor, full in view,

His coat-of-arms, well framed and glazed,
Upon the wall in colors blazed;
He beareth gules upon his shield,

A chevron argent in the field,

With three wolf's-heads, and for the crest
A Wyvern part-per-pale addressed
Upon a helmet barred; below

The scroll reads, "By the name of Howe."
And over this, no longer bright,
Though glimmering with a latent light,
Was hung the sword his grandsire bore
In the rebellious days of yore,
Down there at Concord in the fight.

A youth was there, of quiet ways,
A Student of old books and days,
To whom all tongues and lands
known,

were

And yet a lover of his own;
With many a social virtue graced,
And yet a friend of solitude;
A man of such a genial mood
The heart of all things he embraced,
And yet of such fastidious taste,
He never found the best too good.
Books were his passion and delight,
And in his upper room at home
Stood many a rare and sumptuous tome,
In vellum bound, with gold bedight,
Great volumes garmented in white,
Recalling Florence, Pisa, Rome.
He loved the twilight that surrounds
The border-land of old romance;
Where glitter hauberk, helm, and lance,
And banner waves, and trumpet sounds,
And ladies ride with hawk on wrist,
And mighty warriors sweep along,
Magnified by the purple mist,