Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Last week, by arrangement, a half hour's telephonic discussion was maintained between Philadelphia and Paris, on the merits of the last two French translations of Longfellow's Poems. Twice at least in the winter there are yet larger gatherings of the same kind, at our Academy of Natural Sciences, and at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Not in complacency with Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem, the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever anew, the story without an end.
It was at Longfellow's funeral that Emerson got up from his chair, went to the side of the coffin and gazed long and earnestly upon the familiar face of the dead poet; twice he did this, then said to a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name."
It was through this region, neither water nor land, that the hapless Evangeline, the heroine of Longfellow's famous poem, was rowed, seeking her lover in these flooded wilds, and not dreaming that he lay behind one of those reedy barrens, almost within touch, yet as unseen as if leagues of land separated them.
He presented me with a copy of an illustrated edition of Longfellow's Poems, and I took my leave. Thence I went to the Picture Gallery at the British Institution, where there are three rooms full of paintings by the first masters, the property of private persons. Every one of them, no doubt, was worth studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each.
With him were young Major Endicott from Boston and the eminent Mr. Russell Lowell, who, as Longfellow's successor in the Smith Professorship and one of the editors of The North American Review, was a great figure in cultivated circles. Both were acquaintances made by Mr. Hamilton on a recent visit to Harvard. He found it agreeable to have a few friends with whom he could have scholarly talk.
Our channel is a trifle too alkaline perhaps; and that the transferred material may preserve its pleasant sharpness, we may need to throw in a little extra acid. Too often the mere differences between English and Italian prevent Dante's expressions from coming out in Mr. Longfellow's version so pure and unimpaired as in the instance just cited. But these differences cannot be ignored.
For Longfellow's poems, then just published in England, he expressed the warmest admiration, and thought the author of "Voices of the Night" one of the most perfect artists in English verse who had ever lived.
An imperishable interest has been imparted to this sad story by Longfellow's beautiful poem Evangeline, which describes the sorrows and sufferings of some of the inhabitants of the little village of Grandpré. Robert Clive is recognized as the man to whom, above all others, England owes the establishment of her empire in India.
That line of Longfellow's came into my mind: "Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels." That quotation set me to thinking about Evangeline and the tragedy of her never finding her lover. Could it be possible, I thought, that two people could come so near to finding each other and yet be just too late?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking