There was never any want of promptness or of industry about Longfellow, though his time was apt to be at the mercy of friends or strangers. “Hyperion” appeared in the summer of 1839, and on September 12, 1839, he writes the title of his volume, “Voices of the Night;” five days later he writes, still referring to it:— “First, I shall publish a collection of poems. Then,—History of English Poetry.
“Studies in the Manner of Claude Lorraine; a series of Sketches.
“Count Cagliostro; a novel.
“The Saga of Hakon Jarl; a poem.”
It is to be noticed that neither of these four projects, except it be the second, seems to imply that national character of which he dreamed when the paper in “The North American Review” was written. It is also to be noticed that, as often happens with early plans of authors, none of these works ever appeared, and perhaps not even the beginning was made. The title of “The Saga” shows that his mind was still engaged 138 with Norse subjects. Two months after he writes, “Meditating what I shall write next. Shall it be two volumes more of ‘Hyperion;’ or a drama of Cotton Mather?” Here we come again upon American ground, yet he soon quits it. He adds after an interruption, “Cotton Mather? or a drama on the old poetic legend of Der Armer Heinrich? The tale is exquisite. I have a heroine as sweet as Imogen, could I but paint her so. I think I must try this.” Here we have indicated the theme of the “Golden Legend.” Meantime he was having constant impulses to write special poems, which he often mentioned as Psalms. One of these was the “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year,” which he first called an “Autumnal Chant.” Soon after he says, “Wrote a new Psalm of Life. It is ‘The Village Blacksmith.’” It is to be noticed that the “Prelude,” probably written but a short time before the publication of “Voices of the Night,” includes those allusions which called forth the criticism of Margaret Fuller to the “Pentecost” and the “bishop’s caps.” Yet after all, the American Jews still observe Whitsunday under the name of Pentecost, and the flower mentioned may be the Mitella diphylla, a strictly North American species, though without any distinctly “golden ring.” It has a faint pink suffusion, while the presence of a more 139 marked golden ring in a similar and commoner plant, the Tiarella Pennsylvanica, leads one to a little uncertainty as to which flower was meant, a kind of doubt which would never accompany a floral description by Tennyson.
It is interesting to put beside this inspirational aspect of poetry the fact that the poet at one time planned a newspaper with his friends Felton and Cleveland, involving such a perfectly practical and business-like communication as this, with his publisher, Samuel Colman, which is as follows:[46]—
Cambridge, July 6, 1839.
My dear Sir,—In compliance with your wishes I have ordered 2200 copies of Hyperion to be printed. I do it with the understanding, that you will give your notes for $250 each, instead of the sums mentioned in the agreement: and that I shall be allowed 50 copies instead of 25 for distribution. This will leave you 150, which strikes me as a very large number.
The first Vol. (212 pp.) will be done to-day: and the whole in a fortnight, I hope. It is very handsome; and those who praise you for publishing handsome books, will have some reason for saying so.
Will you have the books, or any part of them 140 done up here?—and in the English style, uncut?—Those for the Boston market I should think you would.
With best regards to Mellen and Cutler,
Very truly yours in haste
Longfellow.
P. S. By the way; I was shocked yesterday to see in the New York Review that Undine was coming out in your Library of Romance. This is one of the tales of the Wonderhorn. Have you forgotten? I intend to come to New York, as soon as I get through with printing Hyperion; and we will bring this design to an arrangement, and one more beside.
Addressed to Samuel Colman, Esq.
8 Astor House,
New York.
That was at a time when it was quite needful that American authors should be business-like, since American publishers sometimes were not. The very man to whom this letter was addressed became bankrupt six months later; half the edition of “Hyperion” (1200 copies) was seized by creditors and was locked up, so that the book was out of the market for four months. “No matter,” the young author writes in his diary, “I had the glorious satisfaction of writing it.” Meanwhile the “Knickerbocker” had not paid its contributors for three years, and the success 141 of “Voices of the Night” was regarded as signal, because the publisher had sold 850 copies in three weeks.
The popularity of the “Voices of the Night,” though not universal, was very great. Hawthorne wrote to him of these poems, “Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world,—this western world, I mean; and it would not hurt my conscience much to include the other hemisphere.”[47] Halleck also said of the “Skeleton in Armor” that there was “nothing like it in the language,” and Poe wrote to Longfellow, May 3, 1841, “I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the ‘Hymn to the Night,’ of the ‘Beleaguered City,’ and of the ‘Skeleton in Armor’ of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me.”
In most of the criticisms of Longfellow’s earlier poetry, including in this grouping even the “Psalm of Life,” we lose sight of that fine remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, who said to Aubrey de Vere, “However inferior the bulk of a young man’s poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own and an inexplicable charm to be found in 142 them alone.” Professor Wendell’s criticisms on Longfellow, in many respects admirable, do not seem to me quite to recognize this truth, nor yet the companion fact that while Poe took captive the cultivated but morbid taste of the French public, it was Longfellow who called forth more translators in all nations than all other Americans put together. If, as Professor Wendell thinks, the foundation of Longfellow’s fame was the fact that he introduced our innocent American public to “the splendors of European civilization,”[48] how is it that his poems won and held such a popularity among those who already had these splendors at their door? It is also to be remembered that he was, if this were all, in some degree preceded by Bryant, who had opened the doors of Spanish romance to young Americans even before Longfellow led them to Germany and Italy.
Yet a common ground of criticism on Longfellow’s early poems lay in the very simplicity which made them, then and ever since, so near to the popular heart. Digby, in one of his agreeable books, compares them in this respect to the paintings of Cuyp in these words: “The objects of Cuyp, for instance, are few in number and commonplace in their character—a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figures in 143 no way remarkable. His power, says a critic, reminds me of some of the short poems of Longf............