Longfellow had always a ready faculty for grouping his shorter poems in volumes, and had a series continuing indefinitely under the name of “Birds of Passage,” which in successive “flights” were combined with longer works. The first was contained in the volume called “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858); the second in “Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863); flight the third appeared in connection with “Aftermath” (1873); flight the fourth in “Masque of Pandora and Other Poems” (1875), and flight the fifth in “Keramos and Other Poems” (1878). These short poems stand representative of his middle life, as “Voices of the Night” and “Ballads” did for the earlier; and while the maturer works have not, as a whole, the fervor and freshness of the first, they have more average skill of execution. The “Tales of a Wayside Inn” was the final grouping of several stories which had accumulated upon him, large and small, and finally demanded a title-page in common. Some of them 214 had been published before and were grouped into a volume in 1863, which, making itself popular, was followed by two more volumes, finally united into one. We have what is not usually the case, the poet’s own account of them, he having written thus to a correspondent in England: “‘The Wayside Inn’ has more foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English family by the name of Howe built there a country house, which has remained in the family down to the present time, the last of the race dying but two years ago. Losing their fortune, they became innkeepers; and for a century the Red-Horse Inn has flourished, going down from father to son. The place is just as I have described it, though no longer an inn. All this will account for the landlord’s coat-of-arms, and his being a justice of the peace, and his being known as ‘the Squire,’—things that must sound strange in English ears. All the characters are real. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel Edrehi, whom I have seen as I have painted him,” etc., etc.
Other participants in the imaginary festivities are the late Thomas W. Parsons, the translator of Dante, who appears as the poet; the theologian being Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard 215 University, an eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker, but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of the participants in the supposed group are now living except Signor Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or less allied to the Longfellow family by the ma............