Part 14 (1/2)
{80 _Life_, ii. 262, 263, 265, 266, 268.}
{81 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xx. 345.}
{82 _Ib._ 347.}
{83 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xxi. 249.}
{84 _Harvard College Papers_ [MS.], 2d ser. xxi. 249.}
{85 _Life_, ii. 248.}
CHAPTER XVIII
BIRDS OF Pa.s.sAGE
Longfellow had always a ready faculty for grouping his shorter poems in volumes, and had a series continuing indefinitely under the name of ”Birds of Pa.s.sage,” which in successive ”flights” were combined with longer works. The first was contained in the volume called ”The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish” (1858); the second in ”Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863); flight the third appeared in connection with ”Aftermath”
(1873); flight the fourth in ”Masque of Pandora and Other Poems” (1875), and flight the fifth in ”Keramos and Other Poems” (1878). These short poems stand representative of his middle life, as ”Voices of the Night”
and ”Ballads” did for the earlier; and while the maturer works have not, as a whole, the fervor and freshness of the first, they have more average skill of execution.
The ”Tales of a Wayside Inn” was the final grouping of several stories which had acc.u.mulated upon him, large and small, and finally demanded a t.i.tle-page in common. Some of them had been published before and were grouped into a volume in 1863, which, making itself popular, was followed by two more volumes, finally united into one. We have what is not usually the case, the poet's own account of them, he having written thus to a correspondent in England: ”'The Wayside Inn' has more foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English family by the name of Howe built there a country house, which has remained in the family down to the present time, the last of the race dying but two years ago. Losing their fortune, they became innkeepers; and for a century the Red-Horse Inn has flourished, going down from father to son. The place is just as I have described it, though no longer an inn. All this will account for the landlord's coat-of-arms, and his being a justice of the peace, and his being known as 'the Squire,'--things that must sound strange in English ears. All the characters are real. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel Edrehi, whom I have seen as I have painted him,” etc., etc.
Other partic.i.p.ants in the imaginary festivities are the late Thomas W.
Parsons, the translator of Dante, who appears as the poet; the theologian being Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard University, an eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker, but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of the partic.i.p.ants in the supposed group are now living except Signor Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or less allied to the Longfellow family by the marriage of her younger brother, Mr. J. G. Thorp, to the poet's youngest daughter. The volume has always been popular, even its most ample form; yet most of the individual poems are rarely quoted, and with the exception of ”Paul Revere's Ride” and ”Lady Wentworth” they are not very widely read. These two are, it is to be observed, the most essentially American among them.
The book was originally to have been called ”The Sudbury Tales,” and was sent to the printer in April, 1863, under that t.i.tle, which was however changed to ”Tales of a Wayside Inn,” through the urgency of Charles Sumner.
It is the common fate of those poets who live to old age, that their critics, or at least their contemporary critics, are apt to find their later work less valuable than their earlier. Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, to mention no others, have had to meet this fate, and Longfellow did not escape it. Whether it is that the fame of the earlier work goes on acc.u.mulating while the later has not yet been tested by time, or that contemporary admirers have grown older and more critical when they are introduced to the later verses, this is hard to decide.
Even when the greatest of modern poets completed in old age the dream of his youth, it was the fas.h.i.+on for a long time to regard the completion as a failure, and it took years to secure any real appreciation to the second part of ”Faust.” This possibility must always be allowed for, but the fact remains that the t.i.tle which Longfellow himself chose for so many of his poems, ”Birds of Pa.s.sage,” was almost painfully suggestive of a series of minor works of which we can only say that had his fame rested on those alone, it would have been of quite uncertain tenure. A very few of them, like ”Keramos,” ”Morituri Salutamus,” and ”The Herons of Elmwood,” stand out as exceptions, and above all of these was the exquisite sonnet already printed in this volume, ”The Cross of Snow,”
recording at last the poet's high water-mark, as was the case with Tennyson's ”Crossing the Bar.” Apart from these, it may be truly said that the little volume called ”Flower de Luce” was the last collection published by him which recalled his earlier strains. His volume ”Ultima Thule” appeared in 1880, and ”In the Harbor,” cla.s.sed as a second part to it, but issued by others after his death. With these might be placed, though not with any precision, the brief tragedy of ”Judas Maccabaeus,”
which had been published in the ”Three Books of Song,” in 1872; and the unfinished fragment, ”Michael Angelo,” which was found in his desk after death. None of his dramatic poems showed him to be on firm ground in respect to this department of poesy, nor can they, except the ”Golden Legend,” be regarded as altogether successful literary undertakings. It is obvious that historic periods differ wholly in this respect; and all we can say is that while quite mediocre poets were good dramatists in the Elizabethan period, yet good poets have usually failed as dramatists in later days. Longfellow's efforts on this very ground were not less successful, on the whole, than those of Tennyson and Swinburne; nor does even Browning, tried by the test of the actual stage, furnish a complete exception.
CHAPTER XIX
LAST TRIP TO EUROPE
On May 27, 1868, Longfellow sailed from New York for Liverpool in the steamer Russia, with a large family party, including his son and his son's bride, his three young daughters, his brother and two sisters, with also a brother-in-law, the brilliant Thomas G. Appleton. On arrival they went at once to the English lakes, visiting Furness Abbey, Corby Castle, and Eden Hall, where he saw still unimpaired the traditional goblet which Uhland's ballad had vainly attempted to shatter. At Morton, near Carlisle, while staying with a friend he received a public address, to which he thus replied, in one of the few speeches of his life:--
”MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,--Being more accustomed to speak with the pen than with the tongue, it is somewhat difficult for me to find appropriate words now to thank you for the honor you have done me, and the very kind expressions you have used. Coming here as a stranger, this welcome makes me feel that I am not a stranger; for how can a man be a stranger in a country where he finds all doors and all hearts open to him? Besides, I myself am a c.u.mberland man,--I was born in the County of c.u.mberland, in the State of Maine, three thousand miles from here,--and you all know that the familiar name of a town or country has a homelike sound to our ears.... You can think then how very grateful it is to me--how very pleasant--to find my name has a place in your memories and your affections. For this kindness I most heartily thank you, and I reciprocate all the good wishes which you have expressed for perpetual peace and amity between our two nations.”{86}
He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at Cambridge, and the scene was thus described by a London reporter:--
”Amid a score or so of Heads of Houses and other Academic dignitaries conspicuous by their scarlet robes, the one on whom all eyes were turned was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The face was one which would have caught the spectator's glance, even if not called to it by the cheers which greeted his appearance in the red robes of an LL. D. Long, white, silken hair and a beard of patriarchal whiteness enclosed a fresh-colored countenance, with fine-cut features and deep-sunken eyes, overshadowed by ma.s.sive eyebrows. In a few well-rounded Latin sentences, Mr. Clark, the Public Orator, recited the claims of the distinguished visitor to the privilege of an honorary degree. The names of Hiawatha and Evangeline sounded strangely amid the sonorous periods.”{87}