Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.

DAYS*

DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

The great Idea baffles wit,
Language falters under it,

It leaves the unlearned in the lurch;
Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find
The measure of the eternal mind,
Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Longfellow, on his mother's side, was descended from John Alden and Priscilla. He was born and spent his boyhood in Portland, Maine. His father's Yorkshire ancestors had come to America about 1675. Longfellow entered Bowdoin College in the same class with Nathaniel Hawthorne. After graduation he spent three years abroad studying modern languages. Of these he was professor at Bowdoin, 1829–35. He then revisited Europe and returned to be professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University 1836-54. The tragedy of his second wife's death in 1861 saddened his later years. Outre-Mer appeared in 1835 when Longfellow was twenty-eight. Hyperion, a prose romance, and Voices of the Night, poems, followed in 1839. Ballads and Other Poems, in 1841, fully established him as a poet. His middle period contained Evangeline, Hiawatha, the best of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, and My Lost Youth. Including prose tales, drama, translation, and anthologies he published more than twenty-five works. The definitive edition of his works brought out in 1886 ran to eleven volumes. Longfellow received an LL.D. from Cambridge University in England and a D.C.L. from Oxford. A marble bust of the poet was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1884.

Longfellow is primarily the poet of the home. He recounted all phases of home life. He is also at his best as a narrative poet and wrote many lengthy narratives. He spoiled many of his otherwise beautifully simple poems by trite expressions and false romanticism. Hiawatha is one of the best existing poetic interpretations of the American Indian.

Longfellow's character was of pronounced simplicity and honesty, and some of his ballads have a splendid ring. His best material was drawn from books and his wide reading in the literature of other races. He was a scholar and a gentleman, but lacked the intellectual rigorousness and fire that would have made him a major poet. Yet no American poet has ever attained such im

mediate and wide popularity. During his lifetime he tasted his

fame to the full.

A DUTCH PICTURE *

SIMON DANZ has come home again,

From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen

And sold him in Algiers.

In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles,
And weathercocks flying aloft in air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare.

In his tulip-garden there by the town,
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown,
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream.

A smile in his gray mustachio lurks

Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain,

And the listed tulips look like Turks,

And the silent gardener as he works

Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.

The windmills on the outermost

Verge of the landscape in the haze,

The poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whiskered sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese.

But when the winter rains begin,

He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old seafaring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin,
And rings upon their hands.

They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night;
Figures in color and design

Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light.

And they talk of ventures lost or won,

And their talk is ever and ever the same, While they drink the red wine of Tarragon, From the cellars of some Spanish Don, Or convent set on flame.

Restless at times with heavy strides
He paces his parlor to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides,
And tugs at her anchor-tow.

Voices mysterious far and near,

Sound of the wind and sound of the sea, Are calling and whispering in his ear, "Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here? Come forth and follow me!"