2 Longfellow's work as a translator extended from almost the beginning to the end of his poetical career, included versions from the French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, German, Danish, and Anglo-Saxon, and culminated in his rendering of Dante's Divine Comedy. This work unquestionably played an important part in his development, increasing the range and suppleness of his powers, and keeping the poet alive in him during the long period when he was completely absorbed by teaching, lecturing, prose writing, the composition and editing of text-books, and foreign travel. For twelve or thirteen years, between his early poems and the new beginning of his poetical work in the Psalm of Life,' he wrote practically nothing in verse except translations.

Toward the end of his life (in a letter of March 7, 1879) he said of translation: And what a difficult work! There is evidently a great and strange fascination in translating. It seizes people with irresistible power, and whirls them away till they are beside themselves. It is like a ghost beckoning one to follow.' (Life, vol. iii, p. 298.) (In all notes on Longfellow's poems, the Life' referred to is Samuel Longfellow's Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 volumes, 1887.)

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! -
For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

1 This poem has been called 'the very heart-beat of the American conscience.' When it was first published, anonymously, in the Knickerbocker magazine for October, 1838, it at once attracted attention. Whittier wrote of it in the Freeman: We know not who the author may be, but he or she is no common man or woman. These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live, -the moral steam enginery of an age of action.' (Quoted by Professor Carpenter in his Life of Whittier.)

The writing of the Psalm' is recorded in Longfellow's Journal under the date of July 26, 1838. He afterwards said of it, I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart at a time when I was rallying from depression.' (Life of Longfellow, vol. i, p. 301.) In other passages of his Journal he speaks of writing another psalm, a psalm of death,' etc. The psalmist to whom the young man speaks, is therefore the poet himself. It was the young man's better heart answering and refuting his own mood of despondency.' (Life, vol. i, pp. 283-284.) See further the Life of Longfellow, vol. i, pp. 281-284; and vol. ii, pp. 186, 283. The poem has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Sanscrit. (Life, vol. i, p. 376; vol. iii, pp. 43, 64.)

FOOTSTEPS OF ANGELS 2

WHEN the hours of Day are numbered,
And the voices of the Night
Wake the better soul, that slumbered,
To a holy, calm delight;

Ere the evening lamps are lighted,
And, like phantoms grim and tall,
Shadows from the fitful firelight

Dance upon the parlor wall;

2 A slightly different version of the first, second, third, sixth, seventh and eighth stanzas, with the title 'Evening Shadows,' is to be found in Longfellow's Journal under the date of February 27, 1838. (Life, vol. i, pp. 287-288). The poem was finished March 26, 1839 (Life, vol. i, pp. 327-328). The fourth stanza alludes to his brother-in-law and closest friend, George W. Pierce, of whose death he had heard in Germany on Christmas Eve of 1835, and of whom he wrote nearly twenty years later: 'I have never ceased to feel that in his death something was taken from my own life which could never be restored. I have constantly in my memory his beautiful and manly character, frank, generous, impetuous, gentle.' The sixth and following stanzas allude to Mrs. Longfellow, who died at Rotterdam, November 29, 1835.

1 During his visit to his friend Ward, in New York, in August, strolling into the library one day after breakfast, he took carelessly from the shelf a volume of Scott's Border Minstrelsy, and opened at one of the notes, containing the tradition about the city of Prague upon which this poem is founded: 'Similar to this was the Nacht Lager, or midnight camp, which seemed nightly to beleaguer the walls of Prague, but which disappeared upon the recitation of certain magical words.' (Life, vol. i, p. 344, note.)

It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea;

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable's length.

'Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,

And do not tremble so;

: Longfellow wrote in his Journal on December 17, 1939: News of shipwrecks horrible on the coast. Twenty bodies washed ashore near Gloucester, one lashed to a piece of the wreck. There is a reef called Norman's Woe where many of these took place; among others the schooner Hesperus. Also the Sea-flower on Black Rock. I must write a ballad upon this.'

The ballad was actually written twelve days later, on the night of December 29: 'I wrote last evening a notice of Allston's poems. After which I sat till twelve o'clock by my fire, smoking, when suddenly it came into my mind to write the "Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus;" which I accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts were running in my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. It was three by the clock. I then went to bed and fell asleep. I feel pleased with the ballad. It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come into my mind by lines but by stanzas.' (Journal, December 30.)

That ever wind did blow.'

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