Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[239]

Wherein amazed he read
A thousand years in thy sight
Are but as yesterday when it is past
And as a watch in the night;

and in the next line ‘downcast’ is substituted for ‘cast down,’ in order to preserve the rhyme. A very curious modification of a whole scene is to be found where the author ventured in the original edition (1851) to introduce a young girl at the midnight gaudiolum or carnival of the monks, she being apparently disguised as a monk, like Lucifer himself. This whole passage or series of passages was left out in the later editions, whether because it was considered too daring by his critics or perhaps not quite daring enough to give full spirit to the scene.

Turning now to ‘The New England Tragedies,’ we find that as far back as 1839, before he had conceived of ‘Christus,’ he had thought of a drama on Cotton Mather. Then a suggestion came to him in 1856 from his German friend, Emanuel Vitalis Scherb, of whom he writes on March 16, 1856: ‘Scherb wants me to write a poem on the Puritans and the Quakers. A good subject for a tragedy.’ On March 25 and 26 we find him looking over books on the subject, especially Besse's ‘Sufferings of the Quakers;’ on April 2 he writes a scene of the play; on May 1 and 2 he is