HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

A. VISITOR to Cambridge, in Massachusetts, is very sure to make his first question, Where did Mr. Longfellow live? and any one whom he meets will be able to give the answer. The ample, dignified mansion, built in Colonial days, and famous as the headquarters of Washington during the first year of the War for Independence, is in the midst of broad fields, and looks across meadows to the winding Charles and the gentle hills beyond. Great elms, fragrant lilacs and syringas, stand by the path which leads to the door; and when the poet was living, the passer-by would often catch a glimpse of him as he paced up and down the shaded veranda which is screened by the shrubbery

Here came, in the summer of 1837, a slight, studiouslooking young man, who lifted the heavy brass knocker, which hung then as it does now upon the front door, and very likely thought of the great general as he let it fall with a clang. He had called to see the owner of the house, Mrs. Andrew Craigie, widow of the apothecary-general of the Continental Army in the Revolution. The visitor asked if there was a room in her house which he could occupy. The stately old lady, looking all the more dignified for the turban which was wound about her head, answered, as she looked at the youthful figure,

"I no longer lodge students."

"But I am not a student; I am a professor in the University."

"A professor?" She looked curiously at one so like most students in appearance.

"I am Professor Longfellow," he said.

"Ah! that is different. I will show you what there is." She led him up the broad staircase, and, proud of her house, opened one spacious room after another, only to close the door of each, saying, "You cannot have that," until at length she led him into the south-east corner-room of the second story. "This was General Washington's chamber," she said. "You may have this ;" and here he gladly set up his home. The house was a large one, and already Edward Everett and Jared Sparks had lived here. Mr. Sparks was engaged, singularly enough, upon the Life and Writings of Washing. ton in the very house which Washington had occupied. Afterwards, when Mr. Longfellow was keeping house here, Mr. Joseph E. Worcester, the maker of the dictionary, shared it with him, for there was room for each family to keep a separate establishment, and even a third could have found independent quarters. When Mrs. Craigie died Mr. Longfellow bought the house, and there was his home until he died.

When he came to Cambridge to be Professor of Modern Languages and Literature in Harvard College he was thirty years old. He was but eighteen when he graduated at Bowdoin College, in the class in which Nathaniel Hawthorne also belonged, and he had given such promise that he was almost immediately called to be professor at Bowdoin. He accepted the appointment on condition that he might have. three years of travel and study in Europe. The immediate result of his life abroad was in some translations, chiefly from the Spanish, in some critical papers, and in Outre Mer [Over Seas], his first prose work. He continued at Bow doin until 1835, when he was invited to Harvard. Again he went to Europe for further study and travel, and after his return spent seventeen years in his professorship,

Two years after he had begun to teach in Harvard College he published Hyperion, a Romance. Hyperion, in classic mythology, is the child of heaven and earth, and in this romance the story is told of a young man who had

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

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earthly sorrows and fortunes, but heavenly desires and hopes. It contains many delightful legends and fancies which travel and student life in Europe had brought to the poet's knowledge, and which he had carried back to his countrymen in America. Once afterward, in 1849, he published a romance of New England, Kavanagh; but in the same year that saw Hyperion there appeared a thin volume of poems entitled Voices of the Night; and after that Mr. Longfellow continued to publish volumes of poetry, sometimes a book being devoted to a single poem, as Evangeline, or The Courtship of Miles Standish, or Hiawatha, more often containing a collection of shorter poems, and sometimes, as in the Tales of a Wayside Inn, a number of poems pleasantly woven into a story in verse.

The house in which Mr. Longfellow lived was full of suggestion of his work, and it remains much as he left it. "The study," as some one wrote of it during the poet's lifetime, "is a busy literary man's workshop: the table is piled with pamphlets and papers in orderly confusion; a high desk in one corner suggests a practice of standing while writing, and gives a hint of one secret of the poet's singularly erect form at an age when the body generally begins to stoop and the shoulders to grow round; an orangetree stands in one window; near it a stuffed stork keeps watch; on the table is Coleridge's ink-stand; upon the walls are crayon likenesses of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Sumner." Here, too, is the chair made from the wood of the spreading chestnut-tree under which the village smithy stood, and given to the poet by the children of Cambridge; here is the pen presented by "beautiful Helen of Maine," the old Danish song-book and the antique pitcher; upon the staircase is the old clock, which

"Points and beckons with its hands;"

one looks out from the chamber windows across the meadows upon the gentle Charles,

"Friends I love have dwelt beside thee,

And have made thy margin dear;"

following the river one sees the trees and chimneys of Elmwood, and perhaps a flight of

“herons winging their way

O'er the poet's house in the Elmwood thickets;

while farther still one catches sight of the white tower of Mount Auburn and thinks of the graves there to which so many of the poet's friends were borne, and to which he himself was at last carried. It would be a pleasant task to read closely in Mr. Longfellow's poems and discover all the kind words which he has written of his friends. A man is known by the company he keeps. How fine must have been that nature which gathered into immortal verse the friendship of Agassiz, Hawthorne, Lowell, Sumner, Whittier, Tennyson, Irving; and chose for companionship among the dead such names as Chaucer, Dante, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare. All these names, and more, will be found strung as beads upon the golden thread of Longfellow's verse.

After all, the old house where the poet lived was most closely connected with his poems, because it was a home. Here his children grew, and out of its chambers issued those undying poems which sing the deep life of the fireside. The Golden Mile-Stone he sings:

"Each man's chimney is his Golden Mile-Stone;

Is the central point, from which he measures

Every distance

Through the gateways of the world around him ;"

In

and the secret of Mr. Longfellow's power is in the perfect art with which he brought all the treasures of the old world stories, and all the hopes of the new, to this central point; his own fireside fed the flames of poetic genius, and kept them burning steadily and purely.

Mr. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, February