91 From his Republic banished without pity The Poets; in this little town of yours, You put to death, by means of a Committee, The ballad-singers and the Troubadours, The street-musicians of the heavenly city, The birds, who make sweet music for us all In our dark hours, as David did for Saul. 'The thrush that carols at the dawn of day From the green steeples of the piny wood; The oriole in the elm; the noisy jay, Jargoning like a foreigner at his food; The bluebird balanced on some topmost As in an idiot's brain remembered words Hang empty 'mid the cobwebs of his dreams! Will bleat of flocks or bellowing of herds Make up for the lost music, when your teams Drag home the stingy harvest, and no more The feathered gleaners follow to your door? 'What! would you rather see the inces sant stir Of insects in the windrows of the hay, And hear the locust and the grasshopper 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 Longfellow, pp. 40-42.) 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. And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume; The congregation of the dead make room The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. As scarlet be,' and ends with 'as the snow.' 1866. 1865. 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. |