With fluted columns, and a roof of red, The Squire came forth, august and splendid sight! Slowly descending, with majestic tread, Three flights of steps, nor looking left nor right, Down the long street he walked, as one who said, 'A town that boasts inhabitants like me Can have no lack of good society !' The Parson, too, appeared, a man austere, And read, with fervor, Edwards on the His favorite pastime was to slay the deer lane, O LITTLE feet! that such long years O little hands! that, weak or strong, Have still so long to give or ask; Am weary, thinking of your task. O little hearts! that throb and beat Such limitless and strong desires; Now covers and conceals its fires. The lovely town was white with appleblooms, And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. 1 Hawthorne and Longfellow were friends for many years. This poem records the impressions and feelings of the day of Hawthorne's burial, May 23, 1864: 'It was a lovely day; the village all sunshine and blossoms and the song of birds. You cannot imagine anything at once more sad and beautiful. He is buried on a hill-top under the pines.' (See the Life, vol. iii, pp. 36, 38, 39; and Mrs. Hawthorne's letter to Longfellow, pp. 40-42.) Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, I was as one who wanders in a trance, The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see -a dream within a dream I only hear above his place of rest The infinite longings of a troubled breast, There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Watch the dead Christ between the living And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic What exultations trampling on despair, I OFT have I seen at some cathedral door 1 The poet's life and work were interrupted by the tragic death, through fire, of Mrs. Longfellow. What he felt most deeply, he never expressed, and this burden of sorrow is scarcely alluded to in his poetry, except in the first of these sonnets, and in The Cross of Snow,' written eighteen years later, and not published till after his death. Unable to write, and unable to live without writing, he took refuge in the work of translating Dante's Divine Comedy, which he had begun in 1843, taken up again in 1853, and now continued and completed, finishing the long task in 1867. From 1861 to 1869 he wrote hardly anything else, except some III I enter, and I see thee in the gloom fragments needed to complete the first part of Tales of a Wayside Inn. During the same years Robert Browning was trying to benumb the intensity of his own sorrow through absorption in the Ring and the Book; and Bryant, after the loss of a wife whom he had worshipped, yet whom he scarcely alludes to in his verse (see O Fairest of the Rural Maids,' The Future Life,' and 'A Lifetime'), took for his task the translation of Homer. Longfellow's Journal, and his letters to Sumner, show also how deeply he felt the life-and-death crisis through which his country was passing in the same years, and to which, also, his verse hardly alludes except for the first of these sonnets. |