This is not to say that “Hiawa tha” and “The Waste Land” are alike in any other feature; of course they are not; they are very different poems. While Longfellow in “Hiawatha” did not abandon entirely his storytelling technique, his drifting away into episodes of symbolic action was a turn toward the future of American poetry.

IV

From the writing of “Hiawatha” onward, we make our approach toward “The White Longfellow,” the familiar image of a tall, highly courteous, gracefully white-bearded man of letters who displayed flashes of boy ishness in his manner. There was no affectation here. It is wrong to think of him as being “genteel” through any desire to be so. He was a gentleman and knew it and could not act or express his opinions in any other way. He had a good word for everyone, even bad poets. “If I didn’t have a good word for them,” he said, “who would?” This was unanswerable.

He loved well-appointed, tastefully austere, impressive houses. On his arrival in Cambridge as the young Smith Professor at Harvard he chose for his lodgings rooms in The Craigie House in Brattle Street, a mansion with a historic past. It was a little like living in a museum—and there he stayed for the rest of his life. On his marriage to his second wife, her father, an immensely wealthy man, bought the house and gave it to them. Certainly it provided shelter for himself, his wife, Frances, their three daughters and two sons.

Longfellow’s domestic life was less idyllic than a brief glance at it may make it seem. It contained two frightening scenes of death. The first was the death (while they toured Northern Europe) of his young wife, Mary, on a wintry November 1835 day in Rotterdam. A veiled reflection of the scene and the winter day as well is reen acted in the death of Hiawatha’s wife. Twenty-six years later the violent death of Frances (the light summer dress she was wearing had caught fire and she was enveloped by flames) was no less shocking. In his attempts to save her, Longfellow was so badly burned that the scars left on his face made it necessary for him to grow a beard—and from this came the figure of “The White Longfellow.” For us it is even more important that eighteen years afterward, Frances’ death inspired the best, the most moving of his sonnets, “The Cross of Snow.” The clarity, the simplicity of the sonnet’s language, the austerity of the “cross of snow” as an image, purge the poem of all suggestion of domestic sentimentality. The poem does, however, suggest the atmosphere—and this with restraint, insight, and depth of feeling—of Frances Longfellow’s personality. Whatever we know of her holding him at arm’s length before their marriage and of her disapproval of his making his personal feelings public in his novels, Hyperion and Kavanaugh, shows a cool-minded, yet understanding, intelligence. In memory of her the contrasts of fire and snow were deeply appropriate. The poem, unspectacular as it may seem upon first reading, is still another proof of the authenticity of Longfellow’s genius.

The Longfellow of “The Craigie House” had other aspects that were carried over from such poems as “The Old Clock on the Stairs” and his echoing “Voices of the Night.”

The museumlike character of the mansion he had made his home probably inspired “Haunted Houses,” a poem that anticipates in imagery and feeling the ghostly visitations in the poems of W. B. Yeats’s middle years:

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

There is a touch of precariousness in these lines, the hints of terror, showing the kinds of restraint of which Longfellow had become a master. This was an exercise, less of “genteel” habit than of growing subtlety and depth of perception. There is also the same play of opposites, “bridge of light” and “dark abyss” as between “fire” and the “cross of snow.” A further reach of Longfellow’s subtle poetic intelligence and wit is in “In the Churchyard at Cambridge,” a poem that supplies an American tradition for the writing of John Crowe Ransom’s “Chills and Fever.”

There is but one step from these poems to Longfellow’s two magnificent elegies: “The Warden of the Cinque Ports”—who was the Duke of Wellington—and “Hawthorne.” In the Hawthorne elegy there is a great deal of self-confessional truth in its deceptively simple lines: in them he describes the trancelike states, the illnesses, in which he wrote some of the best of his own poems. Hawthorne and he had known each other slightly since the days when they met at Bowdoin College; it was a friendship of long-sustained acquaintance, mutual courtesies, and infrequent exchanges of ideas and opinions. It was Hawthorne who had first heard the story that inspired Longfellow to write “Evangeline.” He decided that it was suited to Longfellow’s gifts, not his, and encouraged him in the writing of it. The strong yet thinly woven thread of friendship is implied in the imagery of

Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms
Shot through with golden thread—

In his middle years Longfellow had undertaken the great task of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy, and as he worked toward its completion, he called on two friends, James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, to spend Wednesday evenings with him—and all three discussed, criticized, and read aloud the ambitious manuscript. The result was a substantially impressive version of the Comedy; if anything, it was too substantial, too overweighted by the large number of poetic inversions used at line-endings. It was a scholarly and labored work. Unfortunately, the signs of its labor were not concealed.