owell. He early published two
prose volumes, "Hyperion" and "Outre-mer," Irvingesque romances of
European travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death
of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced,
"softly excited, I know not why," "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm
of Death." From that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he
was Longfellow the Poet.

His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident,
save the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his
children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with
the quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran
softly and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from
the storms of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember,
and to dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal
contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good
neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in
local Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his
Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his
Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the
hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own
sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate
the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and
Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the
lips of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and
historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred
years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth
century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known
it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual
receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear
for folklore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the
most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of
children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and
gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the
richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow
was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the
sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in
large measure to the abse