This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
        (Snow-flakes, 13-18)

1. Aftermath
2. The Arrow and the Song
3. The Arsenal at Springfield
4. The Building of the Ship
5. Chaucer
6. The Children's Hour
7. The Cross of Snow
8. The Day is Done
9. Divina Commedia
10. The Evening Star
11. Excelsior
12. The Fire of Drift-wood
13. Hymn to the Night
14. The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
15. Keats
16. The Ladder of St. Augustine
17. The Landlord's Tale. Paul Revere's Ride
18. Mezzo Cammin
19. Milton
20. Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
21. My Lost Youth
22. Nature
23. Nuremberg
24. The Old Clock on the Stairs
25. A Psalm of Life
26. Seaweed
27. Shakespeare
28. Sir Humphrey Gilbert
29. The Skeleton in Armor
30. Snow-flakes
31. There was a little girl
32. The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
33. Ultima Thule: Dedication to G. W. G.
34. The Witnesses
35. The Wreck of the Hesperus

Notes on Life and Works

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807, and was educated at Portland Academy and alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard University. He taught at Bowdoin from 1829 to 1835 as a professor of foreign languages after travelling widely in Europe 1826-29, and he joined Harvard as Smith Professor of French and Spanish in 1836 (replacing George Ticknor) and taught there until 1854, when the professorship went to James Russell Lowell. He was married twice, his first wife dying in Holland in 1835, and his second, Frances Appleton (whom he married in 1843), dying in a burning accident at home in 1861 when Longfellow himself was injured. While at Harvard, the Longfellows lived at Craigie House, a gift of his father-in-law. He had three daughters and two sons. Longfellow's first book of poems, Voices of the Night, was published in 1839, and his last, In the Harbor, in 1882. Between those two dates, Longfellow published more than 20 books:

• Hyperion, a prose romance (1839)
• Ballads and Other Poems (1842)
• Poems on Slavery (1842)
• The Spanish Student (1843)
• The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846)
• Evangeline (1847)
• Kavagh, a story in prose (1849)
• The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)
• The Golden Legend (1851)
• The Song of Hiawatha (1855)
• The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)
• Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
• Dante's Divine Comedy, a translation (1865-67)
• Flower-de-Luce (1867)
• The Divine Tragedy (1871)
• Christus, a Mystery (1872)
• Three Books of Song (1872)
• Aftermath (1873)
• The Masque of Pandora (1875)
• Kéamos and Other Poems (1878)
• Ultima Thule (1880)

In 1842 Longfellow visited Dickens in London, and his 1868-69 tour of Europe included honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, by which time he had become as universally popular a poet as Tennyson. A bust was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death, the only American to be afforded this honour. For two good lives, see Newton Arvin's Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963) and Edward Wagenknecht's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; PS 2281 W34 Robarts Library).

Biographical information

Given name: Henry Wadsworth
Family name: Longfellow
Birth date: 1807
Death date: 1882