For twenty years Longfellow served as a teacher, introducing hundreds of students to the literature of modern Europe. In his poetry, too, he exerted a powerful influence for bringing about a relationship between America and European civilization. He was thus a poet of culture, rendering a great service at a time when the thought of America was provincial. He was also a poet of the household, writing many poems about the joys and sorrows of home life, poems of aspiration and religious faith, poems about village characters as well as about national heroes. He excels, too, as a writer of tales in verse. “Evangeline,” a story of the Acadian exiles and their wanderings; “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a story of early colonial life in Massachusetts; and “Hiawatha,” an Indian epic into which he put a vast amount of legendary matter belonging to the first owners of our country, are examples of his power in sustained verse narrative. His ballads, such as “The Skeleton in Armor” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” show his power to handle a legend in brief and stirring form. He was a writer of almost perfect sonnets, and a writer of prose of distinction. The most loved and most widely known of American poets, Longfellow helped to interpret our common life in terms of beauty.
=Discussion.= 1. What picture does the first stanza give you? 2. Compare this picture with that found in the first ten lines of “The Snow Storm,” page 78, and with that given in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas of “Midwinter,” page 82. 3. To what does “her” refer in the second line? 4. Explain how “the troubled heart” makes “confession in the countenance.” 5. How does the poet fancy “the troubled sky” reveals its grief? 6. What is “the poem of the air”? 7. What are the “silent syllables” in which “the poem of the air” is recorded? 8. What is “whispered and revealed”?
cloud-folds, 80, 2 cloudy fancies, 80, 7 secret of despair, 80, 15 cloudy bosom, 80, 16
The speckled sky is dim with snow, The light flakes falter and fall slow; Athwart the hilltop, rapt and pale, Silently drops a silvery veil; And all the valley is shut in By flickering curtains gray and thin.
But cheerily the chickadee Singeth to me on fence and tree; The snow sails round him as he sings, White as the down on angels’ wings.