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."

The volume of poems was a great success: in three weeks, less than fifty copies were left from an edition of nine hundred; but the publisher of "Hyperion" failed, and half of the edition was seized for debts. It was generally well received by the critics, though it met with some tremendous attacks. Longfellow wrote that the feelings of the book were true, the events of the story mostly fictitious.

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While lecturing on Spanish literature the following year, the idea of "The Spanish Student" occurred to him, and he immediately carried it out, though he did not publish it for some time. Writing to his father in October he says: "My pen has not been very prolific of late; only a little poetry has trickled from it. There will be a kind of a ballad on a blacksmith in the next Knickerbocker, which you may consider, if you please, was a song in praise of your ancestor at Newbury." Excelsior," which deserves its popularity in spite of its manifest absurdity, was suggested by the seal of the state of New York, which is a shield with a rising sun and the indefensible Latin motto. Of course the significance of the poem is its life, the ideal soul, regardless of caution, and prudence, unmoved by affectionate pleading, woman's love, or formal religion, strains for the highest goal, and, dying in the effort, mounts to the skies.

Longfellow's volume of "Ballads and other Poems"

was published in December, 1841, and six months later he was on his way to Europe for the third time. He spent the summer at the baths at Marienbad. On his way he stopped at Bruges, which inspired him to write the poems on the Belfry. In his diary under date of May 30 he writes: "The chimes seemed to be ringing incessantly, and the air of repose and antiquity was delightful. . O those chimes, those chimes! how deliciously they lull one to sleep! The little bells, with their clear liquid notes, like the voices of boys in a choir, and the solemn base of the great bell tolling in, like the voice of a friar?"

While at Marienbad he partially laid out his plan for his "Christus" drama which had occurred to him suddenly some months before, but which was not completed till 1873. The only verse that he wrote there was a sonnet entitled "Mezzo Cammin." It ends irregularly with an Alexandrine line.

Half of my life is gone, and I have let

The years slip from me, and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth to build

Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret

Of restless passions that would not be stilled;
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,

Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;

Tho' half-way up the hill, I see the Past

Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,

A city in the twilight dim and vast,

With smoking roofs, soft bells and gleaming lights, And hear above me on the autumnal blast

The cataract of death far thundering from the height.

During a brief stay in England he visited Charles Dickens for a fortnight, and had a delightful time, the famous raven doing his share of the entertainment. On his return

to America he published, in a pamphlet of thirty pages a collection of poems on Slavery, which he wrote in pencil while " cribbed, cabined, and confined" to his berth by stormy weather on the return voyage. His views regarding slavery were expressed in a letter to his friend, George Lunt, who had criticised the poems as expressive of a weary attitude:

“I believe slavery to be an unrighteous institution, based on the false maxim that Might makes Right.

"I have great faith in doing what is righteous, and fear no evil consequences.

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I believe that every one has a perfect right to express his opinion on the subject of slavery as on every other thing; that every one ought so to do, until the public opinion of all Christendom shall penetrate into and change the hearts of the Southerners on this subject.

"I would have no other interference than what is sanctioned by law.

"I believe that where there is a will, there is a way. When the whole country sincerely wishes to get rid of slavery, it will readily find the means.

"Let us, therefore, do all we can to bring about this will in all gentleness and Christian charity.

"And God speed the time."

Of course such an attitude was not radical enough to suit the abolitionists; and Longfellow, standing as it were between the two parties, was blamed by both. Yet Whittier wrote to him asking him to accept a nomination to Congress on the ticket of the Liberty party. "Our friends think they could throw for thee one thousand more votes than for any other man." He declined, on the ground that he was not qualified for such a position, and moreover did not belong to that party.

In July, 1843, Longfellow was married to Miss Frances Elizabeth Appleton, in whose company he had enjoyed so much when in Switzerland six years before. During their wedding journey they visited Mrs. Longfellow's relatives, who lived in "the old-fashioned country-seat" at Pittsfield, where stood "the old clock upon the stairs" suggesting its refrain of "Never-Forever." On this journey they passed through Springfield; and in company with Mr. Charles Sumner they visited the Arsenal, where Mrs. Longfellow remarked the resemblance of the gun-barrels to an organ, and suggested what mournful music Death would bring from them. "We grew quite warlike against war," she wrote, "and I urged H. to write a peace poem." He used her beautiful though not perfect comparison in the poem entitled "The Arsenal at Springfield," which grew out of her suggestion.

Shortly after their return to Cambridge, Longfellow accepted a proposal to edit a work on the Poets and Poetry of Europe. It contained specimens from nearly four hundred poets, translated by various hands. Mrs. Longfellow served as her husband's amanuensis, as severe trouble with his eyes, requiring the aid of an oculist, had disabled him. The biographical sketches were mainly prepared by Cornelius Felton, who shared the honorarium. He also purchased the old mansion where he had roomed so long, and which became his home for the rest of his life.

In the first fortnight of October, 1845, he notes in his diary the completion of the poems "To a Child," "To an Old Danish Song-book,' "The Bridge Over the Charles,' and "The Occultation of Orion." On the thirtieth he completed the sonnet "Hesperus," or as he afterwards called it, "The Evening Star," remarked as being the only

love-poem in all Longfellow's verse. It was composed in "the rustic seat of the old apple-tree." He also notes in his diary the difference "between his ideal home-world of poetry and the outer actual, tangible prose world." The routine of teaching galled him. "When I go out of the precincts of my study," he wrote, "down the village street to college, how the scaffoldings about the palace of song come rattling and clattering down."

Still it may be doubted whether a state of absolute leisure would have been more satisfactory to him. Very likely the lark may say in his heart, “How I would fly if it were not for the air that clogs my wings!' The following month Longfellow notes the coming into the world of his second boy and his fourth volume of poems, "The Belfry of Bruges." A few days later he had begun his "idyl in hexameters," the name of which he was in a quandary about: "Shall it be 'Gabrielle,' or 'Célestine,' or 'Evangeline '?"

In his diary he sets down an impromptu verse which came to him as he lay awake at night listening to the rain:

Pleasant it is to hear the sound of the rattling rain upon the roof,

Ceaselessly falling through the night from the clouds that pass so far aloof;

Pleasant it is to hear the sound of the village clock that strikes the hour,

Dropping its notes like drops of rain from the darksome belfry tower.

Of an attack upon his poems by the novelist Simms, he wrote: "I consider this the most original and inventive of all his fictions." A "furious onslaught," by Margaret Fuller, he characterizes as a bilious attack." Later in his diary we come across mention of "a delicious drive,"