Later, by wayward fancies led,

For the wide world I panted; Out of the forest, dark and dread, Across the open fields I fled,

Like one pursued and haunted.

I tossed my arms, I sang aloud,

My voice exultant blending With thunder from the passing cloud, The wind, the forest bent and bowed, The rush of rain descending.

I heard the distant ocean call,

Imploring and entreating;
Drawn onward, o'er this rocky wall
I plunged, and the loud waterfall
Made answer to the greeting.

And now, beset with many ills,
A toilsome life I follow;
Compelled to carry from the hills
These logs to the impatient mills

Below there in the hollow.

Yet something ever cheers and charms
The rudeness of my labors;
Daily I water with these arms
The cattle of a hundred farms,

And have the birds for neighbors.

Men call me Mad, and well they may,
When, full of rage and trouble,
I burst my banks of sand and clay,
And sweep their wooden bridge away,
Like withered reeds or stubble.

Now go and write thy little rhyme,
As of thine own creating.

Thou seest the day is past its prime ;
I can no longer waste my time;
The mills are tired of waiting.

POSSIBILITIES

WHERE are the Poets, unto whom belong The Olympian heights; whose singing shafts were sent

Straight to the mark, and not from bows half bent,

But with the utmost tension of the thong? Where are the stately argosies of song, Whose rushing keels made music as they

went

Sailing in search of some new continent,

The last poem written by Mr. Longfellow. The last verse but one is dated March 12, 1882. The final verse was added March 15. Mr. Longfellow died March 24. The poem was suggested by an article in Harper's Magazine, which the poet had just read.

WHAT say the Bells of San Blas
To the ships that southward pass

From the harbor of Mazatlan ?
To them it is nothing more
Than the sound of surf on the shore,-
Nothing more to master or man.

But to me, a dreamer of dreams,
To whom what is and what seems
Are often one and the same,
The Bells of San Blas to me
Have a strange, wild melody,

-

And are something more than a name. For bells are the voice of the church; They have tones that touch and search The hearts of young and old; One sound to all, yet each Lends a meaning to their speech,

And the meaning is manifold.

They are a voice of the Past, Of an age that is fading fast,

Of a power austere and grand;
When the flag of Spain unfurled
Its folds o'er this western world,

And the Priest was lord of the land.

The chapel that once looked down
On the little seaport town

Has crumbled into the dust;

And on oaken beams below
The bells swing to and fro,

And are green with mould and rust.

"Is, then, the old faith dead," They say, "and in its stead

Is some new faith proclaimed, That we are forced to remain Naked to sun and rain,

Unsheltered and ashamed?

"Once in our tower aloof
We rang over wall and roof

Our warnings and our complaints ;
And round about us there
The white doves filled the air,

Like the white souls of the saints.

"The saints! Ah, have they grown Forgetful of their own?

Are they asleep, or dead,

That open to the sky
Their ruined Missions lie,

No longer tenanted?

"Oh, bring us back once more

The vanished days of yore,

When the world with faith was filled;

Bring back the fervid zeal,
The hearts of fire and steel,

The hands that believe and build.

"Then from our tower again
We will send over land and main
Our voices of command,

Like exiled kings who return
To their thrones, and the people learn
That the Priest is lord of the land !"

O Bells of San Blas, in vain
Ye call back the Past again!

The Past is deaf to your prayer;

Out of the shadows of night
The world rolls into light;

It is daybreak everywhere.

FRAGMENTS

October 22, 1838.

NEGLECTED record of a mind neglected, Unto what "lets and stops" art thou subjected!

The day with all its toils and occupations,
The night with its reflections and sensations,
The future, and the present, and the past,
All I remember, feel, and hope at last,
All shapes of joy and sorrow, as they pass, -
Find but a dusty image in this glass.
August 18, 1847.

O faithful, indefatigable tides,
That evermore upon God's errands go,
Now seaward bearing tidings of the land,
Now landward bearing tidings of the sea,-
And filling every frith and estuary,
Each arm of the great sea, each little creek,
Each thread and filament of water-courses,
Full with your ministration of delight!
Under the rafters of this wooden bridge
I see you come and go; sometimes in haste
To reach your journey's end, which being
done

With feet unrested ye return again
And recommence the never-ending task;
Patient, whatever burdens ye may bear,
And fretted only by the impeding rocks.

December 18, 1847.

Soft through the silent air descend the feathery snow-flakes ;

White are the distant hills, white are the neighboring fields;

Only the marshes are brown, and the river rolling among them

Weareth the leaden hue seen in the eyes of the blind.

August 4, 1856.

A lovely morning, without the glare of the sun, the sea in great commotion, chafing and foaming.

So from the bosom of darkness our days come roaring and gleaming,

Chafe and break into foam, sink into darkness again.

But on the shores of Time each leaves some trace of its passage,

Though the succeeding wave washes it out from the sand.

The reader is referred for a consideration of the place which Christus held in the poet's scheme of work to the biographical sketch prefixed to this edition.

There is no one of Mr. Longfellow's writings which may be said to have so dominated his literary life. The study of Dante and the translation of the Divina Com media subtended a wider arc in time, but from the nature of things the interpretation of a great work was subordinate to the development of a theme which was interior to the poet's thought and emotion. Yet even in point of time, that which elapsed between the first concep tion of Christus and its final accomplishment was scarcely less than that which extended from the day when Mr. Longfellow opened Dante to the end of his life, for so long did he live in companionship with the great seer. The first indication of actual work upon the subject does not appear until the end of 1849, when he seems to have decided to take up first the second division. He had dismissed his volume of poems, The Seaside and the Fireside, "another stone rolled over the hilltop!" and proceeded in his diary, November 19: "And now 1 long to try a loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life, and which I trust and believe will ere long unite themselves into a symphony not all unworthy the sublime theme, but furnishing 'some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery."" On December 10th, he wrote: "A bleak and dismal day. Wrote in the morning The Challenge of Thor as Prologue or Introitus to the second part of Christus." This he laid aside, taking it up again ten years later, when he proposed to write the Saga of King Olaf. It is probable that he had in mind the opposition of northern paganism to the Christianity of sacerdotalism, and the supremacy of the latter. But the theme of the drama was constantly before him in one shape or another. diary, under date of January 10, 1850, he records: "In the evening, pondered and meditated upon sundry scenes of Christus. In such meditation one tastes the delight of the poetic vision, without the pain of putting it into words." The scheme of his first venture had evidently been more or less determined upon, for a few weeks later he notes: "February 28. And so ends the winter and the vacation. Not quite satisfactorily to me. Yet something I have done. Some half dozen scenes or more are written of The Golden Legend, which is Part Second of Christus; and the whole is much clearer in my mind as to handling, division, and the form and pressure of the several parts." It is to be noted that already in 1839 there had crossed his mind the notion of writing a drama based upon the legend of Der Arme Heinrich, and that he had perceived the value of Elsie. "I have a heroine," he says, "as sweet as Imogen, could I but paint her so."

In his

The Golden Legend was published near the close of 1851, but the author gave no intimation of the relation which the work held to a larger plan. He had taken for the core of his poem the story of Der Arme Heinrich as told by Hartmann von der Aue, a minnesinger of the twelfth century, to be found in Mailáth's Altdeutsche Gedichte, published in Stuttgart in 1809, and it was not till after the book was issued that he caught sight of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. His own ac count of his work may be read in brief in a letter which he wrote to an English correspondent at this time. "I am glad to know," he says, "that you find something to like in The Golden Legend. I have endeavored to show in it, among other things, that through the darkness and corruption of the Middle Ages ran a bright, deep stream of Faith, strong enough for all the exigen

cies of life and death. In order to do this I had to in troduce some portion of this darkness and corruption as a background. I am sure you will be glad to know that the monk's sermon is not wholly of my own invention. The worst passage in it is from a sermon of Fra Gabriella Barletta, an Italian preacher of the fifteenth century. The Miracle Play is founded on the Apocry phal Gospels of James and the Infancy of Christ. Both this and the sermon show how sacred themes were handled in the days of long ago.""

It is a strong illustration of the importance which Mr. Longfellow attached to The Golden Legend as a portion of a larger, more inclusive work, that we find him regretting, while his book was in full tide of success, that he had not taken a theme more fit to his purpose which had been chosen by another poet. "We stayed at home," he writes, April 2, 1852, "reading The Saint's Tragedy, the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary put into dramatic form with great power. I wish I had hit upon this theme for my Golden Legend, the medieval part of my Trilogy. It is nobler and more characteristic than my obscure legend. Strange that while I was writing a dramatic poem illustrating the Middle Ages, Kingsley should have been doing the same, and that we should have chosen precisely the same period, about 1230. His poem was published first, but I never saw it, or a review of it, till two days ago." Whether or not Mr. Longfellow would have wrought at the other theme with any more satisfaction to himself, The Golden Legend has taken its place as a faithful ponent of the phase of Christianity which it described. "Longfellow, says a competent authority, in his Golden Legend has entered more closely into the temper of the monk, for good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though they may have given their life's labor to the analysis."

Christus was, however, pressing upon the poet's mind; the completion of the second division only made him more desirous of fulfilling the noble theme. The Golden Legend had been published a few weeks when he wrote in his diary one Sunday: "Dec. 28, 1851. The weather, which has been intensely cold, suddenly changes to rain; and avalanches of snow thunder from the college-roofs all sermon-time. A grand accompaniment to Mr. Ellis, who was preaching about the old prophets, - an excellent discourse. Ah me! how many things there are to meditate upon in this great world! And all this meditation, of what avail is it, if it does not end in some action? The great theme of my poem haunts me ever; but I cannot bring it into act."

It was nearly a score of years before another number of the Trilogy was ready, though it is probable that Mr. Longfellow was in the neighborhood of The New England Tragedies when he was diverted for the time by the attractive theme of The Courtship of Miles Standish. As far back as 1839 he had thought of a drama on Cotton Mather. It is curious that he should have mentioned that and a drama on "the old poetic legend of Der Arme Heinrich" in the same sentence as possible themes, a couple of years before the conception of Christus came to him. In the spring of 1856 he was contemplating a tragedy which should take in the Puritans and the Quakers, and preparing for it by looking over books on the two sects, "particularly," he says, "Besse's Sufferings of the Quakers,— a strange record of violent persecution for merest trifles." He notes on April 2d of that year: "Wrote a scene in my new drama, The Old Colony, just to break ground," and a month later: "May 1. At home all day pondering the New England Tragedy, and writing notes and bits of scenes." He was still experimenting on it in July

and in November, but then he seems to have made a new start and to have begun The Courtship of Miles Standish as a drama.

On the 27th of August, 1857, he had finished the first rough draft of Wenlock Christison, and later resumed his Miles Standish as an idyl. For a while this poem excluded the tragedy, but he took up the latter when the Courtship was completed and began a revision. On the 17th of August, 1858, he notes: "The morning, as usual, worm-eaten with the writing of letters. I am now going to try a scene in Wenlock Christison. I write accordingly scene second of act first. Just as I finish the bells ring noon. There is a distant booming of canLon. F. comes in and says, 'The Queen's message has arrived by the Atlantic cable."" "December 13. I have been at work on Wenlock Christison, moulding and shaping it."

It was ten years after this that The New England Tragedies emerged from the printing-office. Ten copies at first were printed to guard against accident to the manuscript copy, as the author was about leaving home for a considerable absence in Europe. In October of the same year, 1868, the book was published simultaneously in Boston and London. It would seem as if this whole division of the Trilogy caused the poet great doubt, and that he held back from publication out of distrust of his work. He makes but little reference to it in his diary, recording once that he read a portion to Mr. Fields, who received it rather coldly. In this case more emphatically than in the case of The Golden Legend, the relation of the part to the whole was uppermost in the poet's mind. It may be that he in

INTROITUS

tended at first to wait until he could write the first part before publishing the third, but finally gave out the modern portion, as before, with no intination of its place in a larger plan. But The New England Tragedies had no such intrinsic attractiveness as The Golden Legend, and in absence of any explanation of the au thor's ulterior design was taken on its own ground with comparative indifference. The title of Wenlock Christison given to the former of the two tragedies was changed, when the book was published, to John Endicott.

Although Mr. Longfellow projected a third drama, the scene to be laid among the Moravians of Bethlehem, by which he hoped to be able to harmonize the discord of The New England Tragedies and thus give a not unfitting close to the work, he never wrote this drama, and it is most probable that Mr. Longfellow finally regarded the Tragedies as satisfying the requirements of the Trilogy, and was thenceforth impelled by an increased desire to complete his task by the preparation of the first and most difficult number. In the latter part of 1870 he began to make essays in it, and early in January, 1871, he writes in his diary: "The subject of The Divine Tragedy has taken entire possession of me. All day pondering upon and arranging it.”

The Divine Tragedy was published thus at the close of 1871, and in the autumn of 1872 Christus appeared as a complete work. It is an interesting illustration of the place which the work held in his mind that he should now incorporate in it the poem of Blind Bartimeus, which, when he wrote, he was disposed to refer in im agination to a monk of the middle ages. The design of the poet now stood revealed.

Angel of Light,

PROPHET.

through the air.

PROPHET.

WHY dost thou bear me aloft,

O Angel of God, on thy pinions
O'er realms and dominions?

Softly I float as a cloud

In air, for thy right hand upholds me, Thy garment enfolds me!

ANGEL.

Lo! as I passed on my way
In the harvest-field I beheld thee,
When no man compelled thee,
Bearing with thine own hands
This food to the famishing reapers,
A flock without keepers!

The fragrant sheaves of the wheat
Made the air above them sweet;
Sweeter and more divine

Was the scent of the scattered grain,
That the reaper's hand let fall
To be gathered again

By the hand of the gleaner!
Sweetest, divinest of all,

Was the humble deed of thine,

And the meekness of thy demeanor !

I can but obey thee!

ANGEL.

Beautiful was it in the Lord's sight,
To behold his Prophet

Feeding those that toil,

The tillers of the soil.

But why should the reapers eat of it
And not the Prophet of Zion

In the den of the lion ?

The Prophet should feed the Prophet!
Therefore I thee have uplifted,
And bear thee aloft by the hair

Of thy head, like a cloud that is drifted
Through the vast unknown of the air!

Five days hath the Prophet been lying
In Babylon, in the den

Of the lions, death-defying,
Defying hunger and thirst;
But the worst

Is the mockery of men!
Alas! how full of fear

Is the fate of Prophet and Seer!
Forevermore, forevermore,

It shall be as it hath been heretofore;
The age in which they live
Will not forgive