Henry Hawthorne Essay, Research Paper

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Was born in Portland Maine February 27th 1807 in an old square wooden house, upon the edge of the sea. He entered Bowdoin College, where in due time he was graduated in the class with Hawthorne, in 1825. He wrote verses at this time for the United States Literary Gazette printed at Boston.For a short time after leaving college, he studied law in the office of his father the Hon. Stephen Longfellow; but soon fell into the mode of life he has since pursued as a scholar by the appointment to a Professorship of Modern Languages in his college to accomplish himself for which he travelled abroad in 1826 making the usual tour of the continent including Spain. He was absent three years on his return he lectured at Bowdoin College as Professor of Modern Languages and Literature and wrote articles for the North American Review papers on Sir Philip Sidney and other topics of polite literature. One of these an Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain, included his noble translation of the Stanzas of the soldier poet Manrique on the death of his father.

He also at this time penned the sketches of travel in Outre Mer commencing the publication after the manner of Irving in his Sketch Book; but before the work was completed in this form it was intrusted to the Harpers, who issued it entire in two volumes. The elegance of the manner the nice phrases and fanciful illustrations–a certain decorated poetical style with the many suggestions of fastidious scholarship marked this in the eye of the public as a book of dainty promise. In 1835 Mr. Ticknor having resigned his Professorship of Modern Languages and Literature in Harvard Mr. Longfellow was chosen his successor. He now made a second tour to Europe, preliminary to entering upon his new duties, visiting the northern kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and afterwards Switzerland.

Shortly after assuming his engagement at Harvard he established himself, in 1837 as a lodger in the old Cragie House the Washington Head Quarters, which has since become his own by purchase, and the past traditions and present hospitality of which have recently been celebrated by an appreciative pen.It is from this genial residence, the outlook from which has furnished many a happy epithet and incident of the poet’s verse, that Hyperion a Romance was dated in 1839 a dainty volume perfecting the happy promises of Outre Mer. Old European tradition, the quaint and picturesque of the past are revived in its pages, by a modern sentiment and winning trick of the fancy, which will long secure the attractiveness of this pleasant volume. It has been always a scholar’s instinct with Longfellow to ally his poetical style to some rare subject of fact or the imagination worthy of treatment; and those good services which he has rendered to history, old poets, and ancient art, will serve him with posterity, which asks for fruit, while the present is sometimes contented with leaves.

The first volume of original poetry published by Longfellow was the Voices of the Night at Cambridge in 1839. It contained the Psalm of Life the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year the Manrique translation, and a number of the early poems of the Gazette. It at once became popular–many of its stanzas, eloquently expressive of moral courage or passive sentiment veins since frequently worked in his poems, as Excelsior and Resignation, being fairly adopted as “household words.” Ballads and other Poems, and a thin volume of Poems on Slavery, followed in 1842. The former has the translation in hexameters of “The Children of the Lord’s Supper,” from the Swedish of Bishop Tegner. Other delicate cream-colored volumes came on in due sequence. The Spanish Student, a play in three acts, in 1843 The Belfry of Bruges in 1846; Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, a happy employment of the hexameter, the next year; Kavanagh, a Tale, an idyllic prose companion, in 1849; The Seaside and the Fireside, in 1850; and that quaint anecdotal poem of the middle ages in Europe The Golden Legend, in 1851. These, with two volumes of minor poems from favorite sources entitled The Waif and The Estray, prefaced each by a poetical introduction of his own with a collection The Poets and Poetry of Europ, in 184 complete the list thus far of Longfellow’s publications; though some of his finest poems have since appeared in Putnam’s Magazine, to which he is a frequent contributor. In 1854 he resigned his Professorship at Harvard.

The same general characteristics run through all Mr. Longfellow’s productions. They are the work of a scholar, of a man of taste, of a fertile fancy, and of a loving heart. He is “a picked man” of books, and sees the world and life by their light. To interest his imagination the facts around him must be invested with this charm of association. It is at once his aid and his merit that he can reproduce the choice pictures of the past and of other minds with new accessories of his own; so that the quaint old poets of Germany, the singers of the past centuries, the poetical vision and earnest teachings of Goethe, and the every-day humors of Jean Paul, as it were, come to live among us in American homes and landscape. This interpretation in its highest forms is one of the rarest benefits which the scholar can bestow upon his country. The genius of Longfellow has given us an American idyl, based on a touching episode of ante-revolutionary history, parallel with the Hermann and Dorothea of Goethe, in the exquisite story of Evangeline; has shown us how Richter might have surveyed the higher and inferior conditions, the schoolmaster, the clergyman, the lovers and the rustics of a New England village in his tale of Kavanagh; has reproduced the simple elegance of the lighter Spanish drama, in his play of the Student and in his Golden Legend has carried us, in his ingenious verse, to the heart of the Middle Ages, showing us the most poetic aspects of the lives of scholars, churchmen, and villagers how they sang, travelled practised logic medicine, and divinity and with what miracle plays, jest, and grim literature they were entertained. His originality and peculiar merit consist in these felicitous transformations.

If he were simply a scholar he would be but an annalist or an annotator; but being a poet of taste and imagination, with an ardent sympathy for all good and refined traits in the world, and for all forms of the objective life of others, his writings being the very emanations of a kind generous nature, he has succeeded in reaching the heart of the public. All men relish art and literature when they are free from pedantry. We arc all pleased with pictures, and like to be charmed into thinking nobly and acting well by the delights of fancy. In his personal appearance, frank, graceful manner fortune and mode of life Mr. Longfellow reflects or anticipates the elegance of his writings. In a home surrounded by every refinement of art and cultivated intercourse in the midst of his family and friends, the genial humorist enjoys a retired leisure from which many ripe fruits of literature may yet be looked for.