Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a
mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked
with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to
the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea.
_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on
the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef--"Norman's
Woe"--where many of them took place. It was written one night between
twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort."
Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of
Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. There is
nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little
passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling,
often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the
choice of the right word. In this volume were also included _The
Village Blacksmith_ and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of
Life_, have had a "damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as
Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, among
his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places of that
hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague
species of preaching.

In _The Belfry of Bruges_ and _The Seaside and the Fireside_ the
translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were
_The Occupation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's
poems; _Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock
on the Stairs_, _The Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent
closing apostrophe to the Union, and _The Fire of Driftwood_, the
subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these
were verses of a more familiar quality, such as _The Bridge_,
_Resignation_, and _The Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting