THE lights are out, and gone are all the guests

That thronging came with merriment and jests

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 table will not always be closed. By and by you will find new young faces clustering about it; as years go

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

on, 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 peo-
ple 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 publica-
tion 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 Bon-
ner, 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. (Cam
bridge Edition.)

And whatsoever may betide
The great, forgotten world outside;
They want no guests; they needs must be
Each other's own best company.

III

The picture fades; as at a village fair
A showman's views, dissolving into air,

Again appear transfigured on the screen, So in my fancy this; and now once more, 40 In part transfigured, through the open door Appears the selfsame scene.

Seated, I see the two again,
But not alone; they entertain
A little angel unaware,

With face as round as is the moon,
A royal guest with flaxen hair,
Who, throned upon his lofty chair,
Drums on the table with his spoon,
Then drops it careless on the floor,
To grasp at things unseen before.

50

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

scene,

Again the drifting vapors intervene,

100

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 11G
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.

I PACE the sounding sea-beach and behold How the voluminous billows roll and run, Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,

And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold

All its loose-flowing garments into one,
Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
Pale reach of sands, and changes them to
gold.

So in majestic cadence rise and fall
The mighty undulations of thy song,
O sightless bard, England's Mæonides !
And ever and anon, high over all
Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.
1873.

KEATS

(1875.)

THE sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied

As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foresee-
ing

Of things beyond our reason or control.

And whose discourse was like a generous wine,

I most of all remember the divine Something, that shone in them, and made us

see

The archetypal man, and what might be
The amplitude of Nature's first design.
In vain I stretch my hands to clasp their
hands;

I cannot find them. Nothing now is left

10

1 Keats' epitaph upon himself, inscribed on the simple stone that stands at the head of his grave beside the walls of Rome. Of the many poets' protests against its cutting pathos, perhaps the best is this, by J. E Spingarn:

The Star of Fame shines down upon the river,
And answering, the stream of Life repeats:
'Upon our waters shall be writ forever

The name of Keats !'

1 C. C. Felton, for many years professor of Greek at Harvard, and president of the University from 1860 till his death in 1862. See the Life of Longfellow, in many passages, but especially vol. iii, pp. 4, 7, 9.

2 Agassiz was a constant companion of Longfellow's. See note on p. 211, and many passages in the Life.

Charles Sumner was lecturer in the Harvard Law School when Longfellow first came to Cambridge, in 1836, and from that time until his death, in 1874, was one of Longfellow's closest friends.