Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow published two volumes of poetic selections, ‘The Waif’ (1845) and ‘The Estray’ (1846), the latter title being originally planned as ‘Estrays in the Forest,’ and he records a visit to the college library, in apparent search for the origin of the phrase. His next volume of original poems, however, was ‘The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems,’ published December 23, 1845, the contents having already been partly printed in ‘Graham's Magazine,’ and most of them in the illustrated edition of his poems published in Philadelphia. The theme of the volume appears to have been partly suggested by some words in a letter to Freiligrath which seem to make the leading poem, together with that called ‘Nuremberg,’ a portion of that projected series of travel-sketches which had haunted Longfellow ever since ‘Outre-Mer.’ ‘The Norman Baron’ was the result of a passage from Thierry, sent him by an unknown correspondent. One poem was suggested by a passage in Andersen's ‘Story of my Life,’ and one was written at Boppard on the Rhine. All the rest were distinctly American in character or origin. Another poem, ‘To the Driving Cloud,’ the chief of the Omaha Indians, was his first effort at hexameters and prepared the way