In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon
the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on
the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a
friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of
the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the
Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience.
The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the
Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The
Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and
faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind
which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his
countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet
of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far
more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who
is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has
addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for
good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality
which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings,
that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and
England, have brought with them.

Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry
of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise
most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of
these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the
Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the
author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The
Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of
these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the