All is finished! and at length

Has come the bridal day

Of beauty and of strength.

To-day the vessel shall be launched! With fleecy clouds the sky is blanched, And o'er the bay,

Slowly, in all his splendors dight,

The great sun rises to behold the sight.
The ocean old,
Centuries old,

Strong as youth, and as uncontrolled,
Paces restless to and fro,

Up and down the sands of gold.

His beating heart is not at rest;
And far and wide,

With ceaseless flow,

His beard of snow

Heaves with the heaving of his breast. He waits impatient for his bride. There she stands,

With her foot upon the sands,

Decked with flags and streamers gay, In honor of her marriage day,

260

270

280

Her snow-white signals fluttering, blending,

Round her like a veil descending,
Ready to be

The bride of the gray old sea.

Kisses his daughter's glowing cheek
In silence, for he cannot speak,
And ever faster

Down his own the tears begin to run.
The worthy pastor-

The shepherd of that wandering flock,
That has the ocean for its wold,
That has the vessel for its fold,
Leaping ever from rock to rock-
Spake, with accents mild and clear,
Words of warning, words of cheer,
But tedious to the bridegroom's ear.
He knew the chart

Of the sailor's heart,

All its pleasures and its griefs,
All its shallows and rocky reefs,
All those secret currents, that flow
With such resistless undertow,

301

31

And lift and drift, with terrible force,
The will from its moorings and its course.
Therefore he spake, and thus said he:
'Like unto ships far off at sea,

Outward or homeward bound, are we.
Before, behind, and all around,

Floats and swings the horizon's bound, 320
Seems at its distant rim to rise

And climb the crystal wall of the skies,
And then again to turn and sink,

As if we could slide from its outer brink.
Ah! it is not the sea,

It is not the sea that sinks and shelves,
But ourselves

380

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State !
Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our
tears,

!

390

THE LADDER OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

SAINT AUGUSTINE! well hast thou said,3
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread

Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

All common things, each day's events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.

The low desire, the base design,

That makes another's virtues less; The revel of the ruddy wine,

And all occasions of excess;

The longing for ignoble things;

The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart, that brings Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,

That have their root in thoughts of ill;

Whatever hinders or impedes

The action of the nobler will;

20

1 These lines, written twelve years before the beginning of the Civil War (and substituted for a weaker ending with which Longfellow was dissatisfied - see the Life, vol. iii, pp. 363, 443-4), seemed word by word to fit the circumstances and feelings of the nation in that great struggle, and during its progress rouse thousands of audiences to passionate enthusiasm. Lincoln's feeling for them typifies that of the whole people. Mr. Noah Brooks in his paper on Lincoln's Inagination (Scribner's Monthly, August, 1879), mentions that he found the President one day attracted by these stanzas, quoted in a political speech. Knowing the whole poem,' he adds, as one of my early exercises in recitation, I began, at his request, with the description of the launch of the ship, and repeated it to the end. As he listened to the last lines, his eyes filled with tears, and his cheeks were wet. He did not speak for some minutes, but finally said, with simplicity: "It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that."' (Quoted in the Cambridge Edition of Longfellow.) The first public reading of the poem, by Fanny Kemble, is described in Longfellow's Journal, February 12, 1850. Life, vol. ii, p. 172.

The Seaside and the Fireside, in which The Building of the Ship' holds the first place, is dated 1850; but the book was actually published late in 1849. The words of St. Augustine are, De vitiis nostris. scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.' - Sermon III. De Ascensione. (LONGFELLOW.)

Two angels, one of Life and one of Death, Passed o'er our village as the morning broke;

1 In a letter of April 25, 1855, Longfellow speaks of this poem as written on the birth of my younger daughter, and the death of the young and beautiful wife of my neighbor and friend, the poet Lowell. It will serve as an answer to one of your questions about life and its many mysteries. To these dark problems there is no other solution possible, except the one word Pro vidence.' (Life, vol. ii, p. 285.)

SHOULD you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,

1 Those to whom Hiawatha' is familiar from their childhood, but who feel it to be hardly fit food for mature intellects, and those who are wearied by its repetitions, its simplicity, and the monotony of its rhythm, should reread at least the Introduction, and Cantos iii (Hiawatha's Childhood), vii (His Sailing), x (His Wooing), xx (The Famine), and xxii (Hiawatha's Departure). The whole poem, however, without omissions, is necessary to any real knowledge of Longfellow's work or of American poetry. The simplicity of his own character enabled him to reproduce the effects of primitive poetry and legend better than other modern poets have done, and to create what is at least our nearest approach to an American epic. It is greatly superior to all other attempts at epic treatment of the Indian legends. Bayard Taylor said of it: It will be parodied, perhaps ridiculed, in many quarters, but it will live after the Indian race has vanished from our Continent, and there will be no parodies then.' Emerson called it 'sweet and wholesome as maize.'

Longfellow wrote 'Hiawatha' with more enthusiasm than any other of his poems. Cf. the Journal, October 19, 1854: Hiawatha" occupies and delights me. Have I no misgivings about it? Yes, sometimes. Then the theme seizes me and hurries me away, and they vanish.' (Life, vol. ii, p. 277.) The hero,' he wrote to Freiligrath (who afterward translated "Hiawatha" into German), is a kind of American Prometheus.' From the first he felt sure of his subject and his metre: 'I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one, and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the right and only one for such a theme.' (Journal, June 22, 1854.)

The metre was avowedly taken from that of the Finnish epic Kalevala, which he had read with Freiligrath twelve years before. See Freiligrath's letter in the London Athenæum, December 22, 1855.

On the sources from which Longfellow drew his maerial, see his own notes given below. Further, on Hiawatha,' see: Life, vol. i1, pp. 272-311.

Longfellow (Alice M.), A Visit to Hiawatha's People. Schoolcraft (Henry R.), The Myth of Hiawatha and

With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,

From the mountains, moors, and fenlands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.

ΤΟ

other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians.

Broili (Otto), Die Hauptquellen Longfellows Song of Hiawatha. Wurzburg, 1898.

Lang (Andrew), Letters on Literature.

Cracroft, Essays, vol. ii (on the translation of parts of 'Hiawatha' into Latin, for school use, by F. W. Newmen).

Hale (E. E.), in the North American Review, January, 1856.

Chasles (Philarète), in the Journal des Débats, April 20, 1856.

Montégut (Emile), in the Revue des Deux Mondes, June, 1857.

Hale (Henry), Hiawatha played by real Indians,' in the Critic, July, 1905.

2 This Indian Edda - if I may so call it is founded on a tradition, prevalent among the North American Indians, of a personage of miraculous birth, who was sent among them to clear their rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and to teach them the arts of peace. He was known among different tribes by the several names of Michabou, Chiabo, Manabozo, Tarenya-wagon and Hiawatha. Mr. Schoolcraft gives an account of him in his Algic Researches, vol. i, p. 134, and in his History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, part iii, p. 314, may be found the Iroquois form of the tradition, derived from the verbal narrations of an Onondaga chief.

Into this old tradition I have woven other curious Indian legends, drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr. Schoolcraft, to whom the literary world is greatly indebted for his indefatigable zeal in rescuing from oblivion so much of the legendary lore of the Indians.

The scene of the poem is among the Ojibways on the southern shore of Lake Superior, in the region betweer. the Pictured Rocks and the Grand Sable. (LONGFELLOW.)