Then came, after ten
years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden
impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know
not why," "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death." From
that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was
Longfellow the Poet.
His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic
incident, save the one tragic accident by which his second wife,
the mother of his children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He
bore the calamity with the quiet courage of his race and
breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly and gently, enriched
with books and friendships, sheltered from the storms of
circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to
dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal
contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a
good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even
interested in local Cambridge politics. On the larger political
issues of his day his Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is
disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to
see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men
here for freedom and great ideas.
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