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A Day With Longfellow
A Day With Longfellow
A Day With Longfellow
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A Day With Longfellow

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Release dateNov 26, 2013
A Day With Longfellow
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was an American poet. Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow excelled in reading and writing from a young age, becoming fluent in Latin as an adolescent and publishing his first poem at the age of thirteen. In 1822, Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and published poems and stories in local magazines and newspapers. Graduating in 1825, Longfellow was offered a position at Bowdoin as a professor of modern languages before embarking on a journey throughout Europe. He returned home in 1829 to begin teaching and working as the college’s librarian. During this time, he began working as a translator of French, Italian, and Spanish textbooks, eventually publishing a translation of Jorge Manrique, a major Castilian poet of the fifteenth century. In 1836, after a period abroad and the death of his wife Mary, Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he taught modern languages while writing the poems that would become Voices of the Night (1839), his debut collection. That same year, Longfellow published Hyperion: A Romance, a novel based partly on his travels and the loss of his wife. In 1843, following a prolonged courtship, Longfellow married Fanny Appleton, with whom he would have six children. That decade proved fortuitous for Longfellow’s life and career, which blossomed with the publication of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), an epic poem that earned him a reputation as one of America’s leading writers and allowed him to develop the style that would flourish in The Song of Hiawatha (1855). But tragedy would find him once more. In 1861, an accident led to the death of Fanny and plunged Longfellow into a terrible depression. Although unable to write original poetry for several years after her passing, he began work on the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and increased his public support of abolitionism. Both steeped in tradition and immensely popular, Longfellow’s poetry continues to be read and revered around the world.

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    A Day With Longfellow - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Day With Longfellow, by

    Anonymous and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: A Day With Longfellow

    Author: Anonymous

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    Release Date: November 11, 2011 [EBook #37980]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH LONGFELLOW ***

    Produced by Delphine Lettau, Susan Theresa Morin and the

    Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


    DAYS WITH

    THE GREAT

    .POETS.

    LONGFELLOW


    A · DAY · WITH

    LONGFELLOW

    HODDER & STOUGHTON

    LTD., PUBLISHERS LONDON



    Uniform with this Volume


    Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton, Limited,

    by C. Tinling & Co., Ltd., Liverpool, London and Prescot.


    A DAY WITH LONGFELLOW

    The expression of serious and tender thoughtfulness, which always characterized the quiet face of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had deepened during his later years, into something akin to melancholy. The tragic loss of his beloved wife,—burned to death while she was sealing up in paper little locks of her children's hair,—had left its permanent and irrevocable mark upon his life. Still, he did not seclude himself with his sorrow: the professor of Modern Languages at Harvard could hardly do that. He remained the selfsame kindly, gentle, industrious man, welcoming with ready courtesy the innumerable visitors to the Craigie House.

    This is a large old-fashioned house in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a place of grassy terraces, long verandahs, lilac bushes,

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