His father had been educated at Harvard and practiced law with so much gravity, caution, and skill that he became, if not rich, remarkably prosperous. The conservative cast of Longfellow’s mind probably came from examples set before him by his father’s behavior and its successful results. His more adventurous affinities and imaginings came from his mother and the Wadsworths. General Peleg Wadsworth, Zilpah’s father, dressed from cocked hat to buckled shoes in the high fashion of the mideighteenth century, was a vigorous eccentric, a pioneer, a soldier, a storekeeper, a congressman, a gentleman-farmer. In his childhood reveries, and later in his trips through and across the European continent, it is little wonder that the General’s grandson, Henry, delighted in frequent changes of scene and acquired touches of dandyism in his dress. Until he was over forty, Longfellow had exotic lapses from his handsome—he was always good-looking—and habitual air of decorum. Outwardly, he was the normally active and obedient son of a well-to-do lawyer; yet suddenly, and with extreme lassitude, he would make the most of minor illnesses, indulge in “dreams,” as he would call them, and secretly send off bits of verse signed “Henry” to the local newspaper. At sixteen, while a sophomore at Bowdoin College, his exotic adventures were expanded by his taking the role of an Indian chieftain in a dramatized debate in which another boy took the less spectacular part of an “English Emigrant.”

Longfellow’s lapses from cheerfully accepting the world as he found it were, so far as his writings were concerned, significant. They signified his need for remoteness from the everyday prospects of becoming a respectable provincial lawyer like his father. They spurred his desires to know foreign languages, people, and places; they led him into the extremes of wearing fashionable dress in London—an American extreme—which was probably why, when he presented in person his letter of introduction to Bulwer-Lytton (who was a dandy of the British mode) he was so cruelly snubbed. These lapses are also shown by his florid courtship of his second wife, Frances Appleton, in the pages of his novel, Hyperion—who, after reading his effusions in the published book, held him off from marrying her for seven years. The lapses were never shocking in a vulgar sense—for even the subconscious Longfellow was of grained and weathered New England gentry—yet they were embarrassing. It was all too apparent that he had his nearly mindless moments, when his desires, if anything, were all too clear, and therefore seemed nakedly naïve. For us, his sudden, instinctive departures from the conventions of his own life and the lives of those around him illuminate his poetry. Behind the facade of his minor illnesses was hidden his fixed determination not to study law, but to be a poet. Throughout his life, the illnesses he enjoyed were never serious, but were severe enough to ensure privacy as well as a release from the pressures of professional discipline. On these occasions he was also free of intellectual duties—and since he was not an intellectual poet, he made use of his freedom as though he were one who walks into a trance with his mind lost and his eyes wide open. He was then living in a “dream.”

On leaving Bowdoin, Longfellow’s responsibilities were tangible enough. He had persuaded his father that since his abilities were unfitted for law, he would earn his living by becoming a teacher (preferably a college lecturer) of foreign literatures. Both father and son accepted the compromise: the father was assured that his son was not so wild as to hope to earn a living by writing poetry, and the son was relieved from his duty of studying law. Yet the younger Longfellow cordially hated the very thought of academic routines. His father agreed to finance a three-year tour of Europe so as to prepare him for the acceptance of a professorship in modern languages at Bowdoin. Longfellow’s compromise was unevenly resolved. Though he could be and was a popular teacher and lecturer at Bowdoin and later as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, he never completely filled the image of the extraverted American college professor.

Fortunately for us, the Longfellow revealed through his lyrics and tales was not the conventional Longfellow who wrote the concluding stanza of “A Psalm of Life,” whose philosophy so closely approximates the credo of Emerson’s “The American Scholar” as well as that of the nineteenth-century American businessman (and there is also an interesting echo of Byron’s “Here’s a heart for every fate” concealed within it):

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Longfellow said of the poem that it was “a voice from my inmost heart”—and we can say it came from that side of his heart which strenuously opposed the “dream ing” half of it. The conflict here—which should not be taken with too much psychological literalness—was a conflict of ideals: the ideal man of action, mirrored in his father, the lawyer, and his own role as professor of modern languages, at war with the ideal poet. In other ways the conflict gave color and action to the best of his poetry. The life of action is sounded in the galloping metrics of “Paul Revere’s Ride”—yet the story itself makes no pretense at being literal truth: it is a romance, a legend, re-created with extraordinary vividness. Longfellow wrote as though he gazed through a telescope at the ride. In a different fashion the same gaze transforms “The Birds of Killingworth” into a kind of magical light verse. Beneath the surface of an obvious moral, the story is kept in air by undercurrents of humorous, childlike observations and echoes of laughter.

Throughout the great number of pages Longfellow wrote, the words “childhood” and “children” are repeated many times.