O LITTLE feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;
I, nearer to the wayside inn
Where toil shall cease and rest begin,
Am weary, thinking of your road!

O little hands! that, weak or strong,
Have still to serve or rule so long,

Have still so long to give or ask;
I, who so much with book and pen
Have toiled among my fellow-men,

Am weary, thinking of your task.

O little hearts! that throb and beat
With such impatient, feverish heat,

Such limitless and strong desires;
Mine, that so long has glowed and burned,
With passions into ashes turned,

Now covers and conceals its fires.

The lovely town was white with appleblooms,

And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread.

1 Hawthorne and Longfellow were friends for many years. This poem records the impressions and feelings of the day of Hawthorne's burial, May 23, 1864: 'It was a lovely day; the village all sunshine and blossoms and the song of birds. You cannot imagine anything at once more sad and beautiful. He is buried on a hill-top under the pines.' (See the Life, vol. iii, pp. 36, 38, 39; and Mrs. Hawthorne's letter to Long'ellow, pp. 40-42.)

There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold,

Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told.

What tenderness, what tears, what hate of

DIVINA COMMEDIA1

I

OFT have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,

1 The poet's life and work were interrupted by the tragic death, through fire, of Mrs. Longfellow. What he felt most deeply, he never expressed, and this burden of sorrow is scarcely alluded to in his poetry, except in the first of these sonnets, and in The Cross of Snow,' written eighteen years later, and not published till after his death. Unable to write, and unable to live without writing, he took refuge in the work of translating Dante's Divine Comedy, which he had begun in 1843, taken up again in 1853, and now continued and completed, finishing the long task in 1867. From 1861 to 1869 he wrote hardly anything else, except some

III

I enter, and I see thee in the gloom Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

fragments needed to complete the first part of Tales of a Wayside Inn.

During the same years Robert Browning was trying to benumb the intensity of his own sorrow through absorption in the Ring and the Book; and Bryant, after the loss of a wife whom he had worshipped, yet whom he scarcely alludes to in his verse (see O Fairest of the Rural Maids,' The Future Life,' and A Lifetime'), took for his task the translation of Homer.

Longfellow's Journal, and his letters to Sumner, show also how deeply he felt the life-and-death crisis through which his country was passing in the same years, and to which, also, his verse hardly alludes except for the first of these sonnets.

O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor
shines

Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the
heights,

Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,

As of a mighty wind, and men devout, Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear the wondrous word,

And many are amazed and many doubt.

1 The poem you speak of was not a record of any one event which came to my knowledge, but of many which came to my imagination. It is an attempt to express something of the inexpressible sympathy which I feel for the death of the young men in the war, which makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. (LONGFELLOW, in a letter of March 23, 1866.)

Longfellow's oldest son, Charles, was a lieutenant of cavalry in the Army of the Potomac before he was twenty years old. Toward the end of 1863 he was seriously wounded, but recovered. (Life, vol. iii, pp. 21, 24-27.

How many lives, made beautiful and sweet
By self-devotion and by self-restraint,
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint
On unknown errands of the Paraclete,
Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet,
Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint
Around the shining forehead of the saint,
And are in their completeness incomplete!
In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's
tower,

The lily of Florence blossoming in stone,
A vision, a delight, and a desire, -
The builder's perfect and centennial flower,
That in the night of ages bloomed alone,
But wanting still the glory of the spire.

FINALE OF CHRISTUS
SAINT JOHN

SAINT JOHN wandering over the face of the
Earth.

SAINT JOHN:

THE Ages come and go,
The Centuries pass as Years;
My hair is white as the snow,
My feet are weary and slow,
The earth is wet with my tears!
The kingdoms crumble, and fall
Apart, like a ruined wall,
Or a bank that is undermined
By a river's ceaseless flow,
And leave no trace behind!
The world itself is old;
The portals of Time unfold
On hinges of iron, that grate

And groan with the rust and the weight.
Like the hinges of a gate

That hath fallen to decay;

But the evil doth not cease;

There is war instead of peace,
Instead of Love there is hate;
And still I must wander and wait,
Still I must watch and pray,
Not forgetting in whose sight,
A thousand years in their flight
Are as a single day.

The life of man is a gleam
Of light, that comes and goes
Like the course of the Holy Stream,
The cityless river, that flows
From fountains no one knows,
Through the Lake of Galilee,
Through forests and level lands,
Over rocks, and shallows, and sands
Of a wilderness wild and vast,
Till it findeth its rest at last
In the desolate Dead Sea !
But alas! alas for me
Nor yet this rest shall be !

What, then! doth Charity fail?
Is Faith of no avail ?

Is Hope blown out like a light
By a gust of wind in the night?
The clashing of creeds, and the strife
Of the many beliefs, that in vain
Perplex man's heart and brain,
Are naught but the rustle of leaves,

40

THE lights are out, and gone are all the guests

That thronging came with merriment and jests

'One morning in the spring of 1867,' writes Mr. T. B. Aldrich, Mr. Longfellow came to the little home in Pinckney Street [Boston], where we had set up housekeeping in the light of our honeymoon. As we lingered a moment at the dining-room door, Mr. Longfellow turning to me said, "Ah, Mr. Aldrich, your small round table will not always be closed. By and by you will find new young faces clustering about it; as years go

They want no guests, to come between 30
Their tender glances like a screen,
And tell them tales of land and sea,

on, leaf after leaf will be added until the time comes when the young guests will take flight, one by one, to build nests of their own elsewhere. Gradually the long table will shrink to a circle again, leaving two old people sitting there alone together. This is the story of life, the sweet and pathetic poem of the fireside. Make an idyl of it. I give the idea to you." Several months afterward, I received a note from Mr. Longfellow in which he expressed a desire to use this motif in case I had done nothing in the matter. The theme was one peculiarly adapted to his sympathetic handling, and out of it grew The Hanging of the Crane.' Just when the poem was written does not appear, but its first publication was in the New York Ledger, March 28, 1874. Mr. Longfellow's old friend, Mr. Samuel Ward, had heard the poem, and offered to secure it for Mr. Robert Bonner, the proprietor of the Ledger, touched' as he wrote to Mr. Longfellow, by your kindness to poor, and haunted by the idea of increasing handsomely your noble charity fund.' Mr. Bonner paid the poet the sum of three thousand dollars for this poem. (Cam bridge Edition.)