Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely read and loved of
American poets--or, indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and
America--though identified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a
native of Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the
same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, he had
studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and had held the
professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He had published several
text-books, a number of articles on the Romance languages and
literatures in the _North American Review_, a thin volume of metrical
translations from the Spanish, a few original poems in various
periodicals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel entitled
_Outre-Mer_. But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839
of his _Voices of the Night_. Excepting an earlier collection by
Bryant this was the first volume of real poetry published in New
England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and
variety, than Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was
almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It
readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to
impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from
books. This first volume contained a few things written during his
student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on _Autumn_,
clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these
juvenilia had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly true
to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the
ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them,
_Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any American
tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow
uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was
instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old