The images they evoked were in the back chambers as well as in the forefront of his imagination. Although it would be possible to quote the tear-streaked lines of his popular “The Village Blacksmith” as Longfellow at his worst, midway in the poem there is a stanza that shows him very nearly at his best. It is at a moment in the poem that places it in juxtaposition to the sanctimonious moralizings which follow it:

And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

The rural-suburban imagery of the last two lines could not be better; moreover, it is the kind of imagery that remains alive within the charmed circle of childhood memories. The stanza is also an example of unforced, skillfully drawn genre painting in verse, and because it is, one can understand one of the reasons why the poem on its publication in the Knickerbocker Magazine became as popular in London and Edinburgh as in New York: during the 1840s, genre painting was at the height of its career in Scotland and England.

But the superlative poem (written almost twenty years later) of Longfellow’s memory of childhood is “My Lost Youth.” There are no moralizings here, no attempted flights toward portentous meanings, no tears, no melodrama. Although its environment, imagery, and feeling may be called “American,” it transcends its national character as well as the century in which it was written. On its chosen theme it belongs in the company of the best romantic poems in English, a small list that would include Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill. ” Of the poem Longfellow wrote: “March 29: A day of pain; cowering over the fire. At night, as I lie in bed, a poem comes into my mind—a memory of Portland—my native town, the city by the sea.” Next day the poem was written. Surely this visitation of one of his minor illnesses revealed the presence of his demon or genius:

I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

It is almost unnecessary to add that the music of “My Lost Youth,” like that of the remembered Lapland song quoted within it, haunts the ear. Whenever Longfellow’s demon served him best, one sign of its presence was in the compulsive rhythm, in the very music of the poem’s phrasing. Nor did it make much difference from where the music came. So far as the subject of the tale or lyric was concerned, it was Longfellow’s gift to make its music seem—if only for the moment—inevitable. He was, consciously or not, the concertmaster, and if not always the originator, the supreme adaptor of musical forms into English verse. In his arrangements and scoring of the hexameter in “Ev angeline,” not even Tennyson, his British contemporary and a great virtuoso in his own right, could excel him.

It is at the extremes of Longfellow’s ingenuities that his verse excels: it may carry the soft intonations of his early “Hymn to Night,” or the unrhymed metrics of “Tegnér’s Drapa,” or the ghostlike echoes of “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” or the ringing accents of the last lyric he wrote, “The Bells of San Blas.” In the writing of his many sonnets and the blank verse of his plays, one can assume that his musical demon was indifferent. In these the playing is smooth and, of course, correct, but the arrangement is mediocre.

III

The way to approach the longer poems of Longfellow is to regard them as exotic, at times fantastic, visionary tales. In his youth he greatly admired and attempted to emulate Washington Irving. The prose of Longfellow’s early book of European travel sketches, Outre-Mer, had for its model Irving’s The Sketch Book. The refinements of Irving’s half-sentimental, half-humorous, swiftly acquired Gothic Muse—the perfect Muse for one of the first of our great American travelers—inspired and for the moment completely charmed the Longfellow who was preparing to teach European languages at Bowdoin. The Muse was as kind to him as to her earlier friend, the graceful Washington Irving. It was she who kept the sensitive, wavering pointer of Longfellow’s compass directed toward Northern Europe, and aside from her choice of the Finnish Kalevala for the music of “The Song of Hiawatha,” she contributed her share of tears, pathos, and melodrama to his stanzas on “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and was probably active in the composition of the powerful accents overheard in “The Saga of King Olaf.” A deeper colored and fearful aspect of the Gothic Muse had shown itself to Edgar Allan Poe, and though he remained adversely critical of Longfellow, his affinities to her guided his praise of Longfellow’s song “The Day Is Done.” Irving’s influence, however, kept Longfellow’s tales in verse on the side of comedy—the pathos or storm of melodrama followed by a happy ending.

In Longfellow’s tales one must not look for deep psychological insights. His Evangeline is a patient Griselda of French-Canadian bucolic origins following the trail of her betrothed through the wilderness; she is a paragon of faithfulness. All of Longfellow’s women are like figures seen in a parable or fable; they exist at several removes from life itself. His heroes are for the most part stalwart examples of strong, silent meekness like “The Village Blacksmith,” or of somewhat noisy defiance like King Olaf. These are idealized types, made to prove a sermon or point a moral. The tales are tales of action, legendary incident, atmosphere, and feeling. The reasons why “Evangeline” still retains its power to enchant the reader are not difficult to rediscover. Longfellow’s vision of Acadie in Nova Scotia was of a pastoral, North Atlantic Eden, “reflecting an image of heaven.” His young lovers were also the reflected images of Adam and Eve sent out to wander the North American continent. In this light the story takes on meaning and resonance and Longfellow’s imagined landscapes endow it with touches of beauty and mystery rising from the sight of rivers and plains, prairies and forests. It is significant that Longfellow speaks of the Druids in the opening lines of “Evan geline,” for a kind of nature worship runs its course throughout the poem.

“Evangeline” presents a curiously mottled picture of Longfellow’s religious associations; he was neither a “free thinker” nor a Pantheist, nor a deeply religious poet.