Yet dost thou recall

Days departed, half-forgotten, When in dreamy youth I wandered By the Baltic,

When I paused to hear

The old ballad of King Christian
Shouted from suburban taverns
In the twilight.

Thou recallest bards,

Who, in solitary chambers,

And with hearts by passion wasted,
Wrote thy pages.

Thou recallest homes

Where thy songs of love and friendship Made the gloomy Northern winter Bright as summer.

Once some ancient Scald,

In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings.

WALTER VON DER VOGELWEID

VOGELWEID the Minnesinger,
When he left this world of ours,
Laid his body in the cloister,

Under Würtzburg's minster towers.

And he gave the monks his treasures, Gave them all with this behest: They should feed the birds at noontide Daily on his place of rest ;

Saying, "From these wandering minstrels
I have learned the art of song ;
Let me now repay the lessons

They have taught so well and long."

Thus the bard of love departed;

And, fulfilling his desire, On his tomb the birds were feasted By the children of the choir.

Day by day, o'er tower and turret,
In foul weather and in fair,
Day by day, in vaster numbers,
Flocked the poets of the air.

On the tree whose heavy branches
Overshadowed all the place,

On the pavement, on the tombstone,
On the poet's sculptured face,

On the cross-bars of each window,
On the lintel of each door,
They renewed the War of Wartburg,
Which the bard had fought before.

There they sang their merry carols,

Sang their lauds on every side And the name their voices uttered Was the name of Vogelweid.

Till at length the portly abbot Murmured, "Why this waste of food? Be it changed to loaves henceforward For our fasting brotherhood."

Then in vain o'er tower and turret,

From the walls and woodland nests, When the minster bells rang noontide, Gathered the unwelcome guests.

Then in vain, with cries discordant, Clamorous round the Gothic spire, Screamed the feathered Minnesingers For the children of the choir.

Time has long effaced the inscriptions
On the cloister's funeral stones,
And tradition only tells us

Where repose the poet's bones.

But around the vast cathedral,

By sweet echoes multiplied, Still the birds repeat the legend, And the name of Vogelweid.

DRINKING SONG

INSCRIPTION FOR AN ANTIQUE PITCHER

COME, old friend! sit down and listen!
From the pitcher, placed between us,
How the waters laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus !

Old Silenus, bloated, drunken,
Led by his inebriate Satyrs;
On his breast his head is sunken,
Vacantly he leers and chatters.

Fauns with youthful Bacchus follow;
Ivy crowns that brow supernal
As the forehead of Apollo,

And possessing youth eternal.

Round about him, fair Bacchantes,

Bearing cymbals, flutes, and thyrses, Wild from Naxian groves, or Zante's Vineyards, sing delirious verses.

Thus he won, through all the nations,
Bloodless victories, and the farmer
Bore, as trophies and oblations,
Vines for banners, ploughs for armor.

Judged by no o'erzealous rigor,

Much this mystic throng expresses: Bacchus was the type of vigor, And Silenus of excesses.

These are ancient ethnic revels,
Of a faith long since forsaken;
Now the Satyrs, changed to devils,
Frighten mortals wine-o'ertaken.

Now to rivulets from the mountains Point the rods of fortune-tellers; Youth perpetual dwells in fountains, Not in flasks, and casks, and cellars.

Claudius, though he sang of flagons
And huge tankards filled with Rhenish,
From that fiery blood of dragons
Never would his own replenish.

Even Redi, though he chaunted
Bacchus in the Tuscan valleys,
Never drank the wine he vaunted
In his dithyrambic sallies.

Then with water fill the pitcher
Wreathed about with classic fables;
Ne'er Falernian threw a richer
Light upon Lucullus' tables.

Come, old friend, sit down and listen!
As it passes thus between us,

How its wavelets laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus !

THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS

The

The house commemorated in the poem is the Gold house, now known as the Plunkett mansion, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the homestead of Mrs. Longiellow's maternal grandfather, whither Mr. Longfellow went after his marriage in the summer of 1843. poem was not written, however, till November, 1845, when, under date of the 12th of the month, he wrote in his diary: "Began a poem on a clock, with the words 'Forever, never,' as the burden; suggested by the words of Bridaine, the old French missionary, who said of eternity, C'est une pendule dont le balancier dit et redit sans cesse ces deux mots seulement dans le silence des tombeaux, - Toujours, jamais! Jamais, toujours! Et pendant ces effrayables révolutions, un réprouvé s' écrie, Quelle heure est-il et la voix d'un autre misérable lui répond, L'Eternité.'"

-

"October 16, 1845. Before church, wrote The Arrow and the Song, which came into my mind as I stood with my back to the fire, and glanced on to the with paper arrow's speed. Literally an improvisation."

I SHOT an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where ;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where ;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,

A city in the twilight dim and vast, With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,

And hear above me on the autumnal blast

The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

THE EVENING STAR

"October 30, 1845. The Indian summer still in its glory. Wrote the sonnet Hesperus in the rustic seat of the old apple-tree." This sonnet, addressed to his wife, and afterward given its present title, "is noticeable,' says his biographer," as being the only love-poem among E Mr. Longfellow's verses."

Lo! in the painted oriel of the West,

Whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines,

Like a fair lady at her casement, shines The evening star, the star of love and rest!

And then anon she doth herself divest

Of all her radiant garments, and reclines
Behind the sombre screen of yonder pines,
With slumber and soft dreams of love

In Hawthorne's American Note-Books is the following passage:

"H. L. C. heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage-day all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him—wandered about New England all her life-time, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise."

This is the story as set down by the romancer, which his friend, Rev. H. L. Conolly, had heard from a parishioner. Mr. Conolly saw in it a fine theme for a romance, but for some reason Hawthorne was disinclined to undertake it. One day the two were dining with Mr. Longfellow, and Mr. Conolly told the story again and wondered that Hawthorne did not care for it. "If you really do not want this incident for a tale," said Mr. Longfellow to his friend, "let me have it for a poem." Just when the conversation took place we cannot say, but the poem was begun apparently soon after the completion of the volume, The Belfry of Bruges and other Poems, and published October 30, 1847. Hawthorne, who had taken a lively interest in the poem, wrote a few days after, to say that he had read it "with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express. Mr. Longfellow, in replying, thanked him for a friendly notice which he had written for a Salem paper, and added: "Still more do I thank you for resigning to me that legend of Acady. This success I owe entirely to you, for being willing to forego the pleasure of writing a prose tale which many people would have

taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose."

In preparing for his poem Mr. Longfellow drew up the nearest, most accessible materials, which at that time were to be found in Haliburton's An Historica and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, with its liberal quotations from the Abbé Raynal's emotional account of the French settlers. He may have examined Wine low's narrative of the expedition under his command, in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society, not then printed but since that time made easily acces sible. He did not visit Grand-Pré nor the Mississippi, but trusted to descriptions and Banvard's diorama. At the time of the publication of Evangeline the actual history of the deportation of the Acadians had scarcely been investigated. It is not too much to say that this tale was itself the cause of the frequent studies since made, studies which have resulted in a revision of the accepted rendering of the facts.

Mr. Longfellow gave to a Philadelphia journalists reminiscence of his first notice of the material which was used in the conclusion of the poem: "I was pass ing down Spruce Street one day toward my hotel, after a walk, when my attention was attracted to a large building with beautiful trees about it, inside of a high enclosure.1 I walked along until I came to the grest gate, and then stepped inside, and looked carefully over the place. The charming picture of lawn, flower beds, and shade which it presented made an impression which has never left me, and when I came to write Evangeline I placed the final scene, the meeting be tween Evangeline and Gabriel, and the death, at the poor-house, and the burial in an old Catholic grave yard not far away, which I found by chance in another of my walks."