Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Chapter 18: birds of passage

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 Passage,’ which in successive ‘flights’ were combined with longer works. The first was contained in the volume called ‘The Courtship 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 accumulated upon him, large and small, and finally demanded a title-page in common. Some of them