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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 12: voices of the night (search)
l engaged with Norse subjects. Two months after he writes, Meditating what I shall write next. Shall it be two volumes more of Hyperion; or a drama of Cotton Mather? Here we come again upon American ground, yet he soon quits it. He adds after an interruption, Cotton Mather? or a drama on the old poetic legend of Der Armer Heinrich? The tale is exquisite. I have a heroine as sweet as Imogen, could I but paint her so. I think I must try this. Here we have indicated the theme of the Golden Legend. Meantime he was having constant impulses to write special poems, which he often mentioned as Psalms. One of these was the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, which he first called an Autumnal Chant. Soon after he says, Wrote a new Psalm of Life. It is The Village Blacksmith. It is to be noticed that the Prelude, probably written but a short time before the publication of Voices of the Night, includes those allusions which called forth the criticism of Margaret Fuller to the Penteco
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 15: Academic life in Cambridge (search)
political overturn in Massachusetts which culminated in the election of the poet's most intimate friend, Sumner, to the United States Senate. He records the occurrence of his forty-fourth birthday, and soon after when he is stereotyping the Golden Legend he says: I still work a good deal upon it, but also writes, only two days after, Working hard with college classes to have them ready for their examinations. A fortnight later he says: Examination in my department; always to me a day of angud help there—fret the day and consume it. He often records having half a dozen men to dine with him; he goes to the theatre, to lectures, concerts, and balls, has no repose, and perhaps, as we have seen at Nahant, would not really enjoy it. It was under these conditions, however, that the Golden Legend came into the world in November, 1851; and it was not until September 12, 1854, that its author was finally separated from the University. He was before that date happily at work on Hiawatha.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 17: resignation of Professorship—to death of Mrs. Longfellow (search)
tyle attractive to children and gave a charm which it is likely always to retain. With his usual frankness, he stated at the outset that the metre was not original with him, and it was of course a merit in the legends that they were not original. The book received every form of attention; it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read, and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this and other strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the Golden Legend. He himself writes that some of the newspapers are fierce and furious about Hiawatha, and again there is the greatest pother over Hiawatha. Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes him from London, Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in the Athenaeum about the measure from Hiawatha ? He had letters of hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing to its au
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 18: birds of passage (search)
Ultima Thule appeared in 1880, and In the Harbor, classed as a second part to it, but issued by others after his death. With these might be placed, though not with any precision, the brief tragedy of Judas Maccabaeus, which had been published in the Three Books of Song, in 1872; and the unfinished fragment, Michael Angelo, which was found in his desk after death. None of his dramatic poems showed him to be on firm ground in respect to this department of poesy, nor can they, except the Golden Legend, be regarded as altogether successful literary undertakings. It is obvious that historic periods differ wholly in this respect; and all we can say is that while quite mediocre poets were good dramatists in the Elizabethan period, yet good poets have usually failed as dramatists in later days. Longfellow's efforts on this very ground were not less successful, on the whole, than those of Tennyson and Swinburne; nor does even Browning, tried by the test of the actual stage, furnish a com
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 21: the Loftier strain: Christus (search)
publication in 1851 showed more of the dramatic quality than anything else he had printed, and Ruskin gave to it the strong praise of saying, Longfellow in his Golden Legend has entered more closely into the temper of the monk, for good or for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though they may have given their lif to an old ruin with the ivy and the rich blue mould upon it. If the rest of the long planned book could have been as successful as for the time being was the Golden Legend, the dream of Longfellow's poetic life would have been fulfilled. In view of such praise as Ruskin's, the question of anachronism more or less is of course in all the vast list of Longfellow translations into foreign languages, there appears no version of any part of it except the comparatively modern and mediaeval Golden Legend. It has simply afforded one of the most remarkable instances in literary history of the utter ignoring of the supposed high water-mark of a favorite author.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 23: Longfellow as a poet (search)
y had learned to love. He thought also that Bryant and Whittier hardly seemed happy in these belated revisions, and mentioned especially Bryant's Water-Fowl, As darkly limned upon the ethereal sky, where Longfellow preferred the original reading painted on. It is, however, rare to find a poet who can carry out this principle of abstinence, at least in his own verse, and we know too surely that Longfellow was no exception; thus we learn that he had made important alterations in the Golden Legend within a few weeks of publication. These things show that his remark to Mr. Lawton does not tell quite the whole story. As with most poets, his alterations were not always improvements. Thus, in The Wreck of the Hesperus, he made the fourth verse much more vigorous to the ear as it was originally written,— Then up and spoke an old sailor Had sailed the Spanish Main, than when he made the latter line read Sailed to the Spanish Main, as in all recent editions. The explanation d