William Peterfield Trent

“ Both the sonnets and their American encomiasts are fortunately unamenable to comments lacking in amiability, although it is open to doubt whether even such a pathetic sonnet as The Cross of Snow, written at the close of the poet’s life in memory of his unfortunate second wife, will ever mean to the great public what The Bridge and The Day is Done have meant. It is perhaps more to the purpose to express satisfaction that the poet was capable of making the double appeal—to the reader who thinks he knows what to think and to the reader who knows he knows how to feel. ”

“ It is generally and justly regarded as a failure, since Longfellow exhibited neither in it nor in later poems cast in similar form—The New England Tragedies (1868) , Judas Maccabaeus (1872) , and Michael Angelo (1883) ,—the slightest trace of dramatic genius. A poet of literary derivation, so to phrase it, inspired by his own wide reading, and a useful transmitter of culture he could not help being from first to last, and his growing reputation naturally prompted him to undertake elaborate works in a form of art practised by preceding poets in every age. ”

“ The younger man was not only better endowed with the faculty of specific poetic utterance, but he was naturally more fully qualified than his predecessor to gratify the taste of a generation that was beginning to be affected by the work of the newer English romantic poets. ”

“ Other writers might have improved the local colour of the poem, still others might have laboured more heroically to keep the hexameters from making forays across the borders of prose, but it may be doubted whether any contemporary could have written, on the whole, a better Evangeline, at least one more suited to the taste of the period. Few of his contemporaries, however, have left behind a more negligible prose romance than the story of an impossible New England village which Longfellow published in 1849 under the title Kavanagh ”

“ Some notable sonnets had been published with the translation of Dante, and to these Longfellow’s later achievements in the same form are worthy pendants. High praise has been given to them by many critically minded readers of a later generation, who have wished, in default of admiration for Longfellow’s earlier work, to combine patriotism with acumen in their praise of a poet whose reputation seemed to require rather delicate handling. ”

“ Youthful Environment; Education. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born in Portland, Maine, 27 February, 1807. In view of what America as a whole then was and of what he was destined to accomplish for the literature of the country, it is difficult to see how he could have been more fortunately circumstanced with respect to stock and environment. ”

“ The prior volume with such pieces as The Village Blacksmith, God's Acre, Maidenhood, and the egregiously anabatic Excelsior, strengthened his hold upon the popular heart, and in the successful ballads proper, such as The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Skeleton in Armor, it gave him, in addition, some incentive to address his readers in narrative verse, the form of poetry in which, during his middle period, he made himself easily the chief American master. ”

“ Hyperion; Early Poems. His second period of training in Europe, although shorter, rendered Longfellow a greater service than his first. As he was more mature, his genius was better prepared to receive a definitive bent, and his experiences determined that that bent should take an emotional rather than an emphatically intellectual direction. After a short visit to England he spent some months in Sweden and Denmark studying their literatures with results obvious to the reader of his later poetry. Then he went to Holland, where his wife fell ill and died in the autumn. ”