Then in vain, with cries discordant, Clamorous round the Gothic spire, Screamed the feathered Minnesingers For the children of the choir. Time has long effaced the inscriptions But around the vast cathedral, DRINKING SONG INSCRIPTION FOR AN ANTIQUE PITCHER COME, old friend! sit down and listen! Old Silenus, bloated, drunken, Fauns with youthful Bacchus follow; And possessing youth eternal. Round about him, fair Bacchantes, Bearing cymbals, flutes, and thyrses, Wild from Naxian groves, or Zante's Vineyards, sing delirious verses. Thus he won, through all the nations, Vines for banners, ploughs for armor. Judged by no o'erzealous rigor, Much this mystic throng expresses: Bacchus was the type of vigor, And Silenus of excesses. These are ancient ethnic revels, Now to rivulets from the mountains Even Redi, though he chaunted Then with water fill the pitcher Come, old friend, sit down and listen! How its wavelets laugh and glisten THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS The house commemorated in the poem is the Gold house, now known as the Plunkett mansion, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the homestead of Mrs. Longfel low's maternal grandfather, whither Mr. Longfellow went after his marriage in the summer of 1843. The poem was not written, however, till November, 1845, when, under date of the 12th of the month, he wrote in his diary: "Began a poem on a clock, with the words 'Forever, never,' as the burden; suggested by the words of Bridaine, the old French missionary, who said of eternity, C'est une pendule dont le balancier dit et redit sans cesse ces deux mots seulement dans le silence des tombeaur, — Toujours, jamais! Jamais, toujours! Et pendant ces effrayables révolutions, un réprouvé s' écrie, Quelle heure est-il?' et la voix d'un autre misérable lui répond,' L'Eternité.'" SOMEWHAT back from the village street Tall poplar-trees their shadows throw; never! forever!" Half-way up the stairs it stands, 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. THE EVENING STAR. "October 30, 1845. The Indian summer still in its glory. Wrote the sonnet Hesperus in the rustic seat of the old apple-tree." This sonnet, addressed to his wife, and afterward given its present title, "is noticeable, says his biographer, "as being the only love-poem among Mr. Longfellow's verses." Lo! in the painted oriel of the West, Whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines, Like a fair lady at her casement, shines The evening star, the star of love and rest! And then anon she doth herself divest Of all her radiant garments, and reclines O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus ! Dost thou retire unto thy rest at night, AUTUMN THOU comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain, With banners, by great gales incessant fanned, Brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand, And stately oxen harnessed to thy wain! Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne, Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand Outstretched with benedictions o'er the land, Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain ! Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended So long beneath the heaven's o'erhanging eaves; Thy steps are by the farmer's prayers attended; Like flames upon an altar shine the sheaves; And, following thee, in thy ovation splendid, Thine almoner, the wind, scatters the golden leaves ! DANTE TUSCAN, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestio eyes, Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise, Like Farinata from his fiery tomb. Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; Yet in thy heart what human sympathies, What soft compassion glows, as in the skies The tender stars their clouded lamps re lume ! Methinks I see thee stand with pallid cheeks By Fra Hilario in his diocese, As up the convent - walls, in golden streaks, The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease; And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks, Thy voice along the cloister whispers 66 Peace!" CURFEW SOLEMNLY, mournfully, Cover the embers, In Hawthorne's American Note-Books is the following passage: "H. L. C. heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage-day all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, -among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him-wandered about New England all her life-time, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise." This is the story as set down by the romancer, which his friend, Rev. H. L. Conolly, had heard from a parishioner. Mr. Conolly saw in it a fine theme for a romance, but for some reason Hawthorne was disinclined to undertake it. One day the two were dining with Mr. Longfellow, and Mr. Conolly told the story again and wondered that Hawthorne did not care for it. "If you really do not want this incident for a tale," said Mr. Longfellow to his friend, "let me have it for a poem." Just when the conversation took place we cannot say, but the poem was begun apparently soon after the completion of the volume, The Belfry of Bruges and other Poems, and published October 30, 1847, Hawthorne, who had taken a lively interest in the poem, wrote a few days after, to say that he had read it "with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express. Mr. Longfellow, in replying, thanked him for a friendly notice which he had written for a Salem paper, and added: "Still more do I thank you for resigning to me that legend of Acady. This success I owe entirely to you, for being willing to forego the pleasure of writing a prose tale which many people would have taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose.' In preparing for his poem Mr. Longfellow drew upon the nearest, most accessible materials, which at that time were to be found in Haliburton's An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, with its liberal quotations from the Abbé Raynal's emotional account of the French settlers. He may have examined Winslow's narrative of the expedition under his command, in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society, not then printed but since that time made easily accessible. He did not visit Grand-Pré nor the Mississippi, but trusted to descriptions and Banvard's diorama. At the time of the publication of Evangeline the actual history of the deportation of the Acadians had scarcely been investigated. It is not too much to say that this tale was itself the cause of the frequent studies since made, studies which have resulted in a revision of the accepted rendering of the facts. Mr. Longfellow gave to a Philadelphia journalist a reminiscence of his first notice of the material which was used in the conclusion of the poem: "I was passing down Spruce Street one day toward my hotel, after a walk, when my attention was attracted to a large building with beautiful trees about it, inside of a high enclosure. I walked along until I came to the great gate, and then stepped inside, and looked carefully over the place. The charming picture of lawn, flowerbeds, and shade which it presented made an impression which has never left me, and when I came to write Evangeline I placed the final scene, the meeting be tween Evangeline and Gabriel, and the death, at the poor-house, and the burial in an old Catholic grave yard not far away, which I found by chance in another of my walks." 1 The Pennsylvania Hospital. From the outset Mr. Longfellow had no hesitation in the choice of a metre. He had before experimented in it in his translation of The Children of the Lord's Supper, and in his lines To the Driving Cloud. While engaged upon Evangeline he chanced upon a specimen In Blackwood of a hexameter translation of the Iliad, and expressed himself very emphatically on its fitness. "Took down Chapman's Homer," he writes later, "and read the second book. Rough enough; and though better than Pope, how inferior to the books in hexameter in Blackwood! The English world is not yet awake to the beauty of that metre." After his poem was published, he wrote: "The public takes more kindly to hexameters than I could have imagined," and referring to a criticism on Evangeline by Mr. Felton, in which the metre was considered, he said: "I am more than ever glad that I chose this metre for my poem." Again he notes in his diary: "Talked with Theophilus Parsons about English hexameters ; and almost persuaded him to be a Christian.'" While his mind was thus dwelling on the subject, he fell into the measure in his journal entries, and in these lines under date of December 18, 1847. opinion would confirm my choice. The German model which it follows in its measure and the character of its story was itself suggested by an earlier idyl. If Dorothea was the mother of Evangeline, Luise was the mother of Dorothea. And what a beautiful creation is the Acadian maiden! From the first line of the poem, from its first words, we read as we would float down a broad and placid river, murmuring softly against its banks, heaven over it, and the glory of the unspoiled wilderness all around, This is the forest primeval. The words are already as familiar as or Arma virumque cano. The hexameter has been often criticised, but I do not believe any other measure could have told that lovely story with such effect, as we feel when carried along the tranquil current of these brimming, slow-moving, soul-satisfying lines. Imagine for one moment a story like this minced into octosyllabics. The poet knows better than his critics the length of step which best befits his muse." The publication of Evangeline doubtless marks the period of Mr. Longfellow's greatest accession of fame, as it probably is the poem which the majority of readers would first name if called upon to indicate the poet's most commanding work. It was finished upon his fortieth birthday. Two days before, the following lines were written by Mr. Longfellow in his diary :— |