hich the stately hostess was the last and worthy
representative. The old house was as serene and still as the dearest
lover of quiet could wish. The mistress lived quite apart from her
lodger, and left him to follow the bent of his own fancies; and rare
fancies they were, for it was of them that some of his best works were
born in this upper chamber. Here he wrote "Hyperion," in 1838 and 1839.
Its publication, which was undertaken by John Owen, the University
publisher in Cambridge, marked an era in American literature. Every body
read the book, and every body talked of it. It was a poem in prose, and
none the less the work of a poet because professedly "a romance of
travel." The young read it with enthusiasm, and it sent hundreds to
follow Paul Flemming's footsteps in the distant Fatherland, where the
"romance of travel" became their guidebook. The merchant and the lawyer,
the journalist and the mechanic, reading its pages, found that the stern
realities of life had not withered up all the romance of their natures,
and under its fascinations they became boys again. Even Horace Greeley,
that most practical and unimaginative of men, became rapturous over it.
It was a great success, and established the poet's fame beyond all
question, and since then its popularity has never waned.

In 1840, he published the "Voices of the Night," which he had heard
sounding to him in his haunted chamber. This was his first volume, and
its popularity was even greater than that of "Hyperion," although some
of the poems had appeared before, in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." In
1841, he published his volume of "Ballads, and Other Poems," which but
added to his fame, and the next year bade the old house under the elms
a temporary adieu, and sailed for Europe, where he passed the summer on
the Rhine. On the voyage home, he composed his "Poems on Slavery," and
soon after his return wrote "The Spanish Student," a drama, "which
smells of the utmost South, and was a strange blossoming for the garden
of Thomas Tracy."

In 1843 the stately mistress of the old house died, and Professor
Longfellow bought the homestead of Andrew Craigie, with eight acres of
land, including the meadow, which sloped down to the pretty river. There
have been very few prouder or happier moments in his life than that in
which he first felt that the old house under the elms was his. Yet he
must have missed the stately old lady who first had admitted him to a
place in it, and