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Show LONGFELLOW'S FIRST POETRY. So Was More Than Thirty When His Flrrt Volume Was Published. Toward tho end of 1836 he took uj bis abode in Cambridge, where he wat to reside for tho rest of his life for 45 years. He was made to feel at homo in the society of the scholars who clustered cluster-ed about Harvard, then almost the sol center of culture in the country. Hit workfor the college was not so exacting exact-ing that he had not time for literature The impulse to write poetry returned, yet the nextl book he published was the prose "Hyperion," which apppeared is 1839, and which, though it has tfttl plot or action, may be called a romance. The youthful and poetic hero, n passionate passion-ate pilgrim in Europe, wan, more o: less, a reflection of Longfellow himself. A few months later in the same yeai Be pnmishea his first volume of poetry "Voices of the Night" in which he reprinted certain of his earlier verses; most of them written while he was al Bowdoin. Some of these boyish verses ohow the influence of Bryant, and others oth-ers reveal to us that the young poet had not yet looked at life for himself, but still saw it through the stained glass windows of European tradition. The flame volume contained also some more recent poems "The Beleaguered Citv" Mid "The Reaper and thoFlow6rs" and ttio "Psalm of Life' -porhaps tho first of his poems to win a swift and abiding popularity. These lyrics testified that Longfellow was beginning to have a style of his own As Hawthorne wrote to him, "Nothing equal to them waa ever written in this world this western west-ern world, I mean. " Certainly no American author hac yet written any poem of the kind so good as the best of those in Longfellow's Longfel-low's volume of "Ballads," printed two years iator. Better than any otita American poet Longfellow had mastoi'-ed mastoi'-ed the difficulties of the fstory in song, and he knew how to combine the swiftness swift-ness and the picturesqueness tho ballad requires. His ballads have more of the old time inagio, more of the early simplicity, sim-plicity, thAn those of any other modern English author. Of its kind there ia nothing better in the language than "The Skeleton In Armor," with it splendid lyric swing, and "The Village Blacksmith" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" are almost as good in then humbler sphere. "Excelsior," in the same volume, voices tho noble aspirations aspira-tions of youth aad has been taken tc heart by thousands of boys and girls. Professor Brander Matthews in Si Nicholas. |