O LITTLE feet! that such long years O little hands! that, weak or strong, Have still so long to give or ask; Am weary, thinking of your task. O little hearts! that throb and beat Such limitless and strong desires; 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. And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of DIVINA COMMEDIA1 I OFT have I seen at some cathedral door 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! Above the darkness of the Apennines, 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 The lily of Florence blossoming in stone, FINALE OF CHRISTUS SAINT JOHN wandering over the face of the SAINT JOHN: THE Ages come and go, And groan with the rust and the weight. That hath fallen to decay; But the evil doth not cease; There is war instead of peace, The life of man is a gleam What, then! doth Charity fail? Is Hope blown out like a light 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 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.) |