Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/245

 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 179 He said that the poem " I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight" was written in the lonely hours of his widowerhood, when he used to visit Boston evenings and return over the bridge of the Charles. The bridge grew still as the night wore on, and the procession of the day became thin. There was a furnace at Brighton at that time, and the reflection of the red fire fell across the dark river. The bridge over the Charles is nearly the same now as then ; it has been somewhat recon- structed, but the wooden piers are there ; the drifting seaweed, the odor of the brine, and the processions of " care-encumbered men " vanishing into the night. An English nobleman who is a literary critic has pronounced this poem the most sympathetic in the language. Its popularity probably is due to the night scene and the spirit of self-renunciation. It is one of the most beautiful songs of the age as set to music by two English composers. We never tire of the message of sympathy. "Excelsior," which has been greatly parodied, expresses in a simple way what Browning has more artistically illustrated in " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was written one evening after the poet had received a letter from his beloved friend, Charles Sumner, full of lofty sentiments, expressed in the classic rhetoric of the time. As he dropped the letter the word " Excelsior " caught his eye, and the inspiration and the vision of the poem came. He wrote it on the back of the letter which contained the magic word. It is said that the words " Cumnor Hall," in Meckle's ballad, so haunted the mind of Sir Walter Scott as to compel him to write "Kenilworth." "I was led, I think," said Longfellow, "to write the ' Wreck of the Hesperus' by the words ' Norman's Woe.' I had been reading one dreary night of the disasters that had befallen the Gloucester fishing fleet, and my eye met the words ' Nor- man's Woe.' I went to bed, but the story haunted me. I arose and began to write, and the poem came to me in whole stanzas." ' " The Old Clock on the Stairs " was suggested by an old farmhouse timepiece at the country house of Mr. Appleton, his father-in-law. While the house de- scribed was in the country, the description answers well to the poet's own resi- dence, which also contained an eight-day clock which reached from floor to ceil- ing. Many people never so much as doubted that the Cragie House and its clock were meant in the poem. The clock in the Cambridge house was so old and antique that most visitors fancied that they saw in it the real " old clock on the stairs." The refrain was suggested by the French words "Toujours jamais, jamais toujours " in an elegant French quotation. " Hiawatha" was pictured to the poet by the story which Abraham le Fort, an Onondaga chief, gave to Schoolcraft. The musical vocabulary in which the Indian words suggest their own meaning may be found in Schoolcraft. It is the one poem which commemorates the legends of the Indian races ; it will doubt- less outlive those races, and be their tradition in future ages. The Indian words, as in the instance of "Norman's Woe," must have suggested in many cases the scenes and incidents of the poet's creative fancy. "The March of Miles Standish," which followed, repeats the old apocryphal