Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[26] only six of which he saw fit to preserve; dropping behind him, perhaps wisely, the ‘Dirge Over a Nameless Grave,’ ‘Thanksgiving,’ ‘The Angler's Song,’ ‘Autumnal Nightfall,’ ‘A Song of Savoy,’ ‘Italian Scenery,’ ‘The Venetian Gondolier,’ and ‘The Sea Diver.’ He himself says of those which he preserved that they were all written before the age of nineteen, and this is obvious from the very date of the volume. Even in the rejected poems the reader recognizes an easy command of the simpler forms of melody, and a quick though not profound feeling for external nature. Where he subsequently revises these poems, however, the changes are apt to be verbal only, and all evidently matters of the ear. Thus in reprinting ‘The Woods in Winter,’ he omits a single verse, the following:—

On the gray maple's crusted bark
     Its tender shoots the hoarfrost nips;
Whilst in the frozen fountain—hark!
     His piercing beak the bittern dips.

It shows the gradual development of the young poet's ear that he should have dropped this somewhat unmelodious verse. As a rule he wisely forbore the retouching of his early poems. He also contributed to the ‘Gazette’ three articles in prose, quite in Irving's manner, including a few verses. All these attracted some