Longfellow's arrival in France (1826); impressions of Paris; visit to Jules Janin; excursions in France; goes to Spain (1827); meets Washington Irving at Madrid; tour in Italy, and illness at Rome (1827); tour in Germany; returns to Bowdoin as Professor of Modern Languages (1829); edits text books; his style of teaching; begins connection with North American Review (1831); marries Mary Storer Potter, of Portland (1831); appointed Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University (1834); first Longfellow takes his wife to Europe (1835); London society; Sweden and Denmark; death of Mrs. Longfellow in Holland (1835); Longfellow visits Rhineland and Switzer- land; meets Mr. Appleton and Miss Frances Appleton (afterwards his second wife); takes up duties at Harvard (1836); becomes associate of "The Five of Clubs"; rather a dandy; begins residence at Craigie House, Cambridge; his system of lectures; letter from Hawthorne; gradually realizes his vocation to poetry; "A Psalm of Life"; "Hyperion" begun (1838); published (1839); its bearing on his wooing of Miss Appleton; its literary qualities; com- parison between "Hyperion,' ""Twice-Told Tales," and "Sketch Book"; "Wreck of the Hesperus" (1840), and The American Transcendentalists; the Slavery Question; Long- fellow's third visit to Europe (1842); Letter from Dickens ; 83 on Slavery" (1842); marries Frances Elizabeth Appleton (1843); "The Spanish Student" (1843); "Poets and Poetry of Europe" (1845); "The Waif" (1845), and "Evangeline" (1847); account of the Acadian eviction; Haw- thorne and a friend of his give Longfellow the germ of the Longfellow and family go to visit Pittsfield (1848); “Kavanagh” 130 Margaret Fuller's criticisms of Longfellow in "The Dial"; origin of "Hiawatha" (1855); its metre taken from the Finnish "Kalevala"; analysis of "Hiawatha"; The Atlantic Monthly started (1857); Longfellow's contribu- Longfellow's social and literary prosperity; penalties of success; 140 . 156 Nathaniel Hawthorne dies (1864); "Flower-de-Luce” (1867); "The New England Tragedies" (1868); "The Divine Tragedy" (1872); "Christus" (1872); Longfellow visits Europe again (1868); honours accorded to him in England; interview with the Queen; return to America (1869); translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" (1867-70); "Hanging of the Crane" (1874); "The Masque of Pandora" (1875); "Poems of Places" (1876-79); "Kéramos " (1878); "Birds of Passage" (published at various times); "Ultima Thule" (1880); death of Long- Bryant, Emerson, Poe, Whittier, Whitman; Longfellow com- LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. CHAPTER I. HAKESPEARE had lain in his grave four years, S and John Milton was a schoolboy of twelve, when It was this Mary Chilton tremblingly leapt from the Mayflower's pinnace at Cape Cod, and fluttered on to America's rocks like a dove from a new ark. Among the sturdy bigots who had rowed her to the shore, and allowed her to be first of the Puritans to land in the New World, was John Alden: of the company there was also a Yorkshire lass named Priscilla Mullens, whom John Alden coveted for a wife; and he got her. same Priscilla Mullens who really uttered the artless rejoinder, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" that is used with such effect in the story of "Miles Standish." In the latter half of the eighteenth century a descendant of Mr. and Mrs. Alden figured in Portland, Maine, as General Peleg Wadsworth,-upright, bustling, big-built, one who had been among the first to rise in revolution, when". was fired the shot heard round the world," and one who in old age could show wounds and tell many stories brought from the earliest of American battle-fields. General Peleg Wadsworth had eleven children, and his eldest daughter, Zilpah, became the mother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet. Fifty or sixty years after the Puritans disembarked from the Mayflower, an emigrant from England called William Longfellow settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, and there married and begat six children. Like Priscilla Mullens, he came from Yorkshire, and such slight record of his youth and career as is left to us proves him to have been industrious and successful as a colonist. But his end was premature; for in 1690 he joined the Newbury Company's Expedition against Quebec, and in one of that ill-starred association's vessels was wrecked and drowned off the shore of Anticosti. The house that this progenitor of the American Longfellows built at Byfield, Newbury, was still standing, but in ruins, in 1882. Pictures represent it as a substantial building of wood, with a crooked elm in front; and William Longfellow may have half-fancied, on a summer evening, that he could hear the caw of the Yorkshire rooks amid the branches of this tree. One of William's sons, Stephen, became a blacksmith at Newbury; the blacksmith also begat a son, christened Stephen, who was rewarded for signs of precocious talent by being sent to Harvard College, and then developed into a schoolmaster. Although he began active life as a schoolmaster, this Stephen Longfellow ended as a man of some property, and town clerk of Gorham, Maine. He kept the records of his town in a handwriting of which the beautiful character has been faithfully copied by most of his descendants. Now the town clerk, after the manner of his father, in turn called one of his boys |