And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.

The air is filled with some unknown perfume;

The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of
pine

The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
And lamentations from the crypts below;
And then a voice celestial that begins
With the pathetic words,' Although your
sins

As scarlet be,' and ends with 'as the snow.' 1865. 1866.

O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor
shines

Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the
heights,

Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,

As of a mighty wind, and men devout, Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear the wondrous word,

And many are amazed and many doubt.

ΙΟ

Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,
He was humming the words of some old
song:

1 The poem you speak of was not a record of any one event which came to my knowledge, but of many which came to my imagination. It is an attempt to express something of the inexpressible sympathy which I feel for the death of the young men in the war, which makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. (LONGFELLOW, in a letter of March 23, 1866.)

Longfellow's oldest son, Charles, was a lieutenant of cavalry in the Army of the Potomac before he was twenty years old. Toward the end of 1863 he was seriously wounded, but recovered. (Life, vol. iii, pp. 21, 24-27.

How many lives, made beautiful and sweet
By self-devotion and by self-restraint,
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint
On unknown errands of the Paraclete,
Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet,
Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint
Around the shining forehead of the saint,
And are in their completeness incomplete!
In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's
tower,

The lily of Florence blossoming in stone,
A vision, a delight, and a desire,
The builder's perfect and centennial flower,
That in the night of ages bloomed alone,
But wanting still the glory of the spire.

THE Ages come and go,
The Centuries pass as Years;
My hair is white as the snow,
My feet are weary and slow,
The earth is wet with my tears!
The kingdoms crumble, and fall
Apart, like a ruined wall,

Or a bank that is undermined
By a river's ceaseless flow,
And leave no trace behind!
The world itself is old;

The portals of Time unfold
On hinges of iron, that grate

ΤΟ

And groan with the rust and the weight, Like the hinges of a gate

That hath fallen to decay;

But the evil doth not cease;
There is war instead of peace,
Instead of Love there is hate;
And still I must wander and wait,
Still I must watch and pray,
Not forgetting in whose sight,
A thousand years in their flight
Are as a single day.

The life of man is a gleam
Of light, that comes and goes
Like the course of the Holy Stream,
The cityless river, that flows
From fountains no one knows,
Through the Lake of Galilee,
Through forests and level lands,
Over rocks, and shallows, and sands
Of a wilderness wild and vast,
Till it findeth its rest at last
In the desolate Dead Sea !
But alas! alas for me
Nor yet this rest shall be !

What, then! doth Charity fail?
Is Faith of no avail ?

Is Hope blown out like a light
By a gust of wind in the night?
The clashing of creeds, and the strife
Of the many beliefs, that in vain
Perplex man's heart and brain,
Are naught but the rustle of leaves,

20

30

40

THE lights are out, and gone are all the guests

That thronging came with merriment and jests

1 One morning in the spring of 1867,' writes Mr. T. B. Aldrich, Mr. Longfellow came to the little home in Pinckney Street [Boston], where we had set up housekeeping in the light of our honeymoon. As we lingered a moment at the dining-room door, Mr. Longfellow turning to me said, "Ah, Mr. Aldrich, your small round I table will not always be closed. By and by you will find new young faces clustering about it; as years go

on,

For two alone, there in the hall,
Is spread the table round and small;
Upon the polished silver shine
The evening lamps, but, more divine,
The light of love shines over all;
Of love, that says not mine and thine,
But ours, for ours is thine and mine.

20

They want no guests, to come between 30
Their tender glances like a screen,
And tell them tales of land and sea,

leaf after leaf will be added until the time comes when the young guests will take flight, one by one, to build nests of their own elsewhere. Gradually the long table will shrink to a circle again, leaving two old people sitting there alone together. This is the story of life, the sweet and pathetic poem of the fireside. Make an idyl of it. I give the idea to you." Several months afterward, I received a note from Mr. Longfellow in which he expressed a desire to use this motif in case I had done nothing in the matter. The theme was one peculiarly adapted to his sympathetic handling, and out of it grew The Hanging of the Crane.' Just when the poem was written does not appear, but its first publication was in the New York Ledger, March 28, 1874. Mr. Longfellow's old friend, Mr. Samuel Ward, had heard the poem, and offered to secure it for Mr. Robert Bonner, the proprietor of the Ledger, touched' as he wrote to Mr. Longfellow, 'by your kindness to poor and haunted by the idea of increasing handsomely your noble charity fund.' Mr. Bonner paid the poet the sum of three thousand dollars for this poem. (Cambridge Edition.)

60

Are these celestial manners? these
The ways that win, the arts that please?
Ah yes; consider well the guest,
And whatsoe'er he does seems best;
He ruleth by the right divine
Of helplessness, so lately born
In purple chambers of the morn,
As sovereign over thee and thine.
He speaketh not; and yet there lies
A conversation in his eyes;
The golden silence of the Greek,
The gravest wisdom of the wise,
Not spoken in language, but in looks
More legible than printed books,
As if he could but would not speak.
And now, O monarch absolute,
Thy power is put to proof; for, lo!
Resistless, fathomless, and slow,
The nurse comes rustling like the sea, 70
And pushes back thy chair and thee,
And so good night to King Canute.

There are two guests at table now;
The king, deposed and older grown,
No longer occupies the throne,
The crown is on his sister's brow;
A Princess from the Fairy Isles,
The very pattern girl of girls,
All covered and embowered in curls,
Rose-tinted from the Isle of Flowers,
And sailing with soft, silken sails
From far-off Dreamland into ours.
Above their bowls with rims of blue
Four azure eyes of deeper hue
Are looking, dreamy with delight;
Limpid as planets that emerge
Above the ocean's rounded verge,
Soft-shining through the summer night.
Steadfast thy gaze, yet nothing see
Beyond the horizon of their bowls;
Nor care they for the world that rolls
With all its freight of troubled souls
Into the days that are to be.

V

80

90

Again the tossing boughs shut out the

And the moon's pallid disk is hidden quite;
And now I see the table wider grown,
As round a pebble into water thrown
Dilates a ring of light.

I see the table wider grown,
I see it garlanded with guests,
As if fair Ariadne's Crown

Out of the sky had fallen down;
Maidens within whose tender breasts 110
A thousand restless hopes and fears,
Forth reaching to the coming years,
Flutter awhile, then quiet lie,
Like timid birds that fain would fly,
But do not dare to leave their nests; -
And youths, who in their strength elate
Challenge the van and front of fate,
Eager as champions to be
In the divine knight-errantry
Of youth, that travels sea and land
Seeking adventures, or pursues,
Through cities, and through solitudes
Frequented by the lyric Muse,

The phantom with the beckoning hand,
That still allures and still eludes.
O sweet illusions of the brain!
O sudden thrills of fire and frost!
The world is bright while ye remain,
And dark and dead when ye are lost!

120

Quickens its current as it nears the mill; And so the stream of Time that lingereth

In level places, and so dull appears,
Runs with a swifter current as it nears
The gloomy mills of Death.

And now, like the magician's scroll,
That in the owner's keeping shrinks
With every wish he speaks or thinks,
Till the last wish consumes the whole,
The table dwindles, and again
I see the two alone remain.
The crown of stars is broken in parts;
Its jewels, brighter than the day,
Have one by one been stolen away
To shine in other homes and hearts.
One is a wanderer now afar

In Ceylon or in Zanzibar,

Or sunny regions of Cathay;

And one is in the boisterous camp

140

'Mid clink of arms and horses' tramp, 150 And battle's terrible array.

I see the patient mother read,
With aching heart, of wrecks that float
Disabled on those seas remote,
Or of some great heroic deed

On battle-fields, where thousands bleed
To lift one hero into fame.
Anxious she bends her graceful head
Above these chronicles of pain,
And trembles with a secret dread
Lest there among the drowned or slain
She find the one beloved name.

VII

160

After a day of cloud and wind and rain Sometimes the setting sun breaks out again, And, touching all the darksome woods with light,

Smiles on the fields, until they laugh and sing,

Then like a ruby from the horizon's ring Drops down into the night.

What see I now? The night is fair,
The storm of grief, the clouds of care, 170
The wind, the rain, have passed away;
The lamps are lit, the fires burn bright,
The house is full of life and light;
It is the Golden Wedding day.
The guests come thronging in once more,

AN old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and
hound,

And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery
mead.