Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

the possible charge of colorlessness. That strangeness of flavor which a late distinguished critic notes as a mark of genius is imparted by Poe's work to our literary product as a whole. Here indeed was 'the blossoming of the aloe.'

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[ocr errors]

HIS LIFE

HE Longfellows are descendants of William Longfellow of Horsforth in Yorkshire, who came to New England about 1676,' settled in Newbury, and married Anne Sewall, a sister of Samuel Sewall, the first chief-justice of Massachusetts. Well educated but a little wild' is one of several illuminating phrases used to describe this young Yorkshireman. He joined the expedition against Quebec under Sir William Phipps (1690) and perished in a wreck on the coast of Anticosti. One of his sons, Stephen, a blacksmith, had a son who was graduated at Harvard, became a school

Samuel Longfellow: Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, second edition, 1886, and Final Memorials of... Long fellow, 1887.

W. D. Howells: Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 1900.

G. R. Carpenter: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Beacon Biographies,' 1901.

T. W. Higginson: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, • American Men of Letters,' 1902.

master in Falmouth (Portland), and held important offices in the town government. His son, the third Stephen, grandfather of the poet, was judge of the court of common pleas, and representative of his town in the legislature.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, in the District of Maine, on February 27, 1807. He was the second son of Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer, conspicuous in political life, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and afterwards, when Maine acquired statehood, a representative for his state in Congress. The mother of the poet, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was a daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, whose adventures during the Revolution bordered on the romantic. Through the Wadsworths the poet was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens.

At the age of thirteen Longfellow printed in the Portland Gazette' his boyish rhymes on 'The Battle of Lovell's Pond.' He studied at private schools and at the Portland Academy, entered Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in the Sophomore year, and was graduated in 1825, the fourth in a class of thirty-eight. That he stood so high seemed to him rather a mystery.' Before leaving college he had begun contributing to the 'United States Literary Gazette,' a new bi-monthly, published in Boston and edited by Theophilus Parsons. In one year seventeen of his poems ap

[ocr errors]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »