Henry W. Longfellow, the American Children’s Poet
Living in Portland, Maine, a town of rare beauty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could hardly have helped being a poet, even if he had tried. He was born in a big, square, three-story house, close to the edge of Casco Bay, one of the largest and loveliest harbors in the world. Portland stands on several wooded hills, overlooking the bay, which is said to contain three hundred and sixty-five small islands—one for every day in the year. On the blue water the green islands sparkle like emeralds on a shining sea of sapphire.
From the highest point on Great Diamond, one of the larger islands in the harbor, little Henry could see, sometimes, as the sun was setting behind the hills of Portland, the hazy blue and pink outlines of the White Mountains, more than a hundred miles away. Any boy with eyes and heart to take in the deep meaning of it all would have wanted to be a poet. Henry’s inner nature throbbed in response to the beauties of Nature without, and because he had the gift of putting his feelings into words, he was a poet long before he or those around him realized it.
Like the boy Benjamin Franklin and the boy George Washington, who lived about a hundred years before him, the Longfellow boy had the best chances to hear the sailors who came into port tell their tales of the sea—of pirates and hairbreadth adventures.
Henry’s grandfather—his mother’s father—was bluff old General Peleg Wadsworth, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He could tell stories of the struggle for independence that would have fired the soul of any boy.
In the War of 1812, when the little Longfellow lad was only five, a company of American soldiers was stationed in the fort at Portland to defend the town against attacks from British warships. Young as Henry was, he understood what all the excitement meant. When he was in his seventh year, he heard the booming of the cannon in the great sea battle between the American brig Enterprise and the British schooner Boxer. Both commanders were killed and buried on one of the hills of Portland. There was a sensation when the Enterprise towed the Boxer into port as a prize of war. In the poem, “My Lost Youth,” nearly fifty years after the battle, Longfellow wrote:
“I remember the sea-fight far away
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay
Where they in battle died.”
Out near Hiram, Maine, where the Wadsworth family lived, there was a little lake known as Lovell’s Pond. On one of his visits to his grandfather’s, young Henry heard the story of a battle which had taken place there during the French and Indian War. When he was thirteen he wrote four stanzas which he named “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.” Signing it “Henry,” he left it at the office of the Portland Gazette, telling only his sister what he had done. A writer has told a story of the way Henry’s first published poem was received:
“In the morning how slowly the father unfolded the damp sheet, and how carefully he dried it at the open fire before he began to read it! And how much foreign news there seemed to be in it!
“At last, Henry and the sister who shared his secret peeped over their parent’s shoulder—and the poem was there! They spent most of the day reading it. In the evening they went to play with a son of Judge Mellen, and while the judge was sitting by the fire in the twilight with the young folk and a few older neighbors around him, he said,
“Did you see the piece in to-day’s paper? Very stiff, remarkably stiff! Moreover, it is all borrowed—every word of it!”
When Henry was fifteen, his father sent him to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, with his older brother, Stephen. Though the father was himself a graduate of Harvard, he was a director of this new college in his own state. Henry was graduated at eighteen and, young though he was, the trustees of the college invited him to come back, a few years later, as their professor of modern languages.
So the young graduate traveled in Europe to gain a speaking knowledge of all the languages he would have to teach. At the age of twenty-two, he became a professor at Bowdoin.
After five years at his own college, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was chosen Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. He spent the first year in Europe. The next year he began his work as a Harvard professor. He boarded at the Craigie mansion, which had been General Washington’s headquarters during the first year of the War for Independence, sixty years before. Indeed, he slept in the same room occupied by the Father of his Country as a bedroom.
Although he had published several books of poetry, Longfellow’s poems did not begin to be popular till “A Psalm of Life” was published, in his thirty-third year. This poem made many people talk about him. Ministers preached about it, and the lines were set to music. Here is one stanza of this famous poem:
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.”
Then such short poems as “Excelsior,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “The Day Is Done,” and many others, were recited in schools and sung in thousands of homes.
Of Longfellow’s longer poems, “Evangeline” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” are, perhaps, the most popular. It is said that more people know of the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth through the latter poem than by reading the history of the country. It is a story of the lovely Priscilla and her true lover, John Alden, who came to ask her to marry Miles Standish. That little captain was brave enough to fight with savages, but he shrank from the bright eyes of Priscilla Mullens. John Alden was a true soldier and delivered his captain’s message, but Priscilla, knowing his loyal heart, only smiled at him and asked: “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” And one of the great-great-great-grandsons of John Alden and his lovely wife, Priscilla, was the poet Longfellow!
“Hiawatha,” the poem about the Indian tribes, is also a great favorite, especially with the children. This is because of its descriptions of Indian customs and legends. It is the life history of the Indian boy, Hiawatha, from the time when he was a funny little papoose till he had grown to sturdy manhood.
When the little Indian boy was old enough he was sent out on a lone hunt through the wilderness to fit himself to become a true Indian brave. Here is what he did and saw and heard at that time:
“Forth into the forest straightway
All alone walked Hiawatha
Proudly, with his bow and arrows;
And the birds sang round him, o’er him:
‘Do not shoot us, Hiawatha!’
Sang the robin, the Opeechee,
Sang the bluebird, the Owaissa,
‘Do not shoot us, Hiawatha!’
“Up the oak-tree close behind him,
Sprang the squirrel, Adjidaumo,
In and out among the branches,
Coughed and chattered from the oak-tree,
Laughed, and said between his laughing,
‘Do not shoot me, Hiawatha!’”
Some of the Indian tribes of the Great Northwest were so delighted with “Hiawatha” that they voted to make the poet one of their great chiefs; and after Longfellow himself had gone to the “Happy Hunting Grounds” across the River of Death, the Indians went through a formal service making the poet’s daughter Alice a girl chief.
It must have been because he was so fond of children that Longfellow became known as the “Children’s Poet.” In the hall of quaint old Craigie House, which became the poet’s home, stood the stately “Old Clock on the Stairs,” solemnly ticking: “Forever, never! Never, forever!” In the early morning the spacious rooms were made bright with the merry laughter of Longfellow’s three little daughters, running down to spend an hour with their kindly, white-haired poet father. Of this he wrote in a poem named “The Children’s Hour”:
“From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.”
Longfellow’s last poem was about “The Bells of San Blas,” which appeared in print just a few days before he died. The close of this—the last poetry he ever wrote—were these three lines:
“Out of the shadow of night
The world rolls into light—
It is daybreak everywhere.”