FREE ESSAY ON HENRY HAWTHORNE

HENRY HAWTHORNE

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.