Their melancholy hurdy-gurdies play ?140 Is this more pleasant to you than the whir Of meadow-lark, and her sweet roundelay,

Or twitter of little field-fares, as you take Your nooning in the shade of bush and brake?

'You call them thieves and pillagers; but know,

They are the winged wardens of your farms,

Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe,

And from your harvests keep a hundred harms;

Even the blackest of them all, the crow,

Renders good service as your man-at

The omnipresent pain.

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.j

I

OFT have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,

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
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

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 ab sorption 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.

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.

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 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,

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