Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/299

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

after her death another sorrow came to him by the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend, George W. Pierce, of whom he wrote, after twenty years had passed, " I have never ceased to feel that in his death something was taken from my life which could never be restored." His poem ' The Footsteps of Angels ' is con- secrated to the memories of his wife and his friend, and the remembrance that they " had lived and died " consoled him in his loneliness.

It is strange now to remember how near we were to losing considers

Longfellow as a poet. Shortly before his return home from his his poetic

first visit to Europe he wrote to his father : " My poetic career career

is finished. Since I left America I have hardly put two lines finished, together " ; and writing to his friend George W. Greene from Bowdoin College on the 27th of June, 1830, he said :

" I am proud to have your favorable opinion of those little poetic attempts of mine which date so many years back. I had long ceased to attach any kind of value to them, and, indeed, to think of them .... If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first."

It was not until the autumn of 1839 that his first volume of voices of original poems appeared, ' Voices of the Night.' Its publication the Night.' was a sudden thought, coming to him in the exhilaration of his busy life. In the volume he included some of his poems written before he was nineteen. Its success was signal, and in three weeks the publisher had only fifty copies left out of nine hundred ; and by July, 1846, between eleven and twelve thousand copies had been sold.

On the 19th of December, 1841, 'Ballads and other Poems ' 'Ballads and appeared. To most of these a history is attached. The skeleton other Poems, in armour really exists, and was seen by the poet, who " supposed it tojbe the remains of one of the old Northern sea-rovers who came to America in the tenth century." ' The Village Blacksmith ' was in praise of the first Stephen Longfellow, who by the early death of his father was left to struggle for himself, and became a blacksmith ; but he sent his son to Harvard. The ballad of the schooner Hesperus occurred to Longfellow as he sat with his pipe by the fire at midnight on the 30th of December, 1839. He went to bed, but could not sleep, and got up at three to finish the poem ; he was pleased with it, and it cost him hardly an effort. On the following night, the last of the old year, he writes in his diary :

" Shake hands, old friend ; I have learned much from thee ; and sung thy spring in prose and thy autumn in song. And now fare- well !

Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb !

Take this new tenant to thy trust, , And give these sacred relics room

To slumber in the silent dust."

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