Birds of Passage

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The American poet Longfellow is probably best known for Hiawatha, but he was an extremely gifted writer whose body of work is very large and varied, He was the first to translate Dante's Divine Comedy into English among other things. This collection represents some of his finest work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547054818

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.

Book preview

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Birds of Passage

EAN 8596547054818

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought

Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought

The Ladder of St. Augustine

The Phantom Ship

The Warden of the Cinque Ports

Haunted Houses

In the Churchyard at Cambridge

The Emperor's Bird's-Nest

The Two Angels

Daylight and Moonlight

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

Oliver Basselin

Victor Galbraith

My Lost Youth

The Ropewalk

The Golden Mile-Stone

Catawba Wine

Santa Filomena

The Discoverer of the North Cape

Daybreak

The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz

Children

Sandalphon

The Children's Hour

Enceladus

The Cumberland

Snow-Flakes

A Day of Sunshine

Something Left Undone

Weariness

Fata Morgana

The Haunted Chamber

The Meeting

Vox Populi

The Castle-Builder

Changed

The Challenge

The Brook and the Wave

Aftermath

Charles Sumner

Travels by the Fireside

Cadenabbia

Monte Cassino

Amalfi

The Sermon of St. Francis

Belisarius

Songo River

The Herons of Elmwood

A Dutch Picture

Castles in Spain

Vittoria Colonna

The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face

To the River Yvette

The Emperor's Glove

A Ballad of the French Fleet

The Leap of Roushan Beg

Haroun Al Raschid

King Trisanku

A Wraith in the Mist

The Three Kings

Song: Stay, Stay at Home, my Heart, and Rest.

The White Czar

Delia

Flight the First

Table of Contents

Birds of Passage

Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought

Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought

The Ladder of St. Augustine

The Phantom Ship

The Warden of the Cinque Ports

Haunted Houses

In the Churchyard at Cambridge

The Emperor's Bird's-Nest

The Two Angels

Daylight and Moonlight

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

Oliver Basselin

Victor Galbraith

My Lost Youth

The Ropewalk

The Golden Mile-Stone

Catawba Wine

Santa Filomena

The Discoverer of the North Cape

Daybreak

The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz

Children

Sandalphon

Flight the Second

Table of Contents

The Children's Hour

Enceladus

The Cumberland

Snow-Flakes

A Day of Sunshine

Something Left Undone

Weariness

Flight the Third

Table of Contents

Fata Morgana

The Haunted Chamber

The Meeting

Vox Populi

The Castle-Builder

Changed

The Challenge

The Brook and the Wave

Aftermath

Flight the Fourth

Table of Contents

Charles Sumner

Travels by the Fireside

Cadenabbia

Monte Cassino

Amalfi

The Sermon of St. Francis

Belisarius

Songo River

Flight the Fifth

Table of Contents

The Herons of Elmwood

A Dutch Picture

Castles in Spain

Vittoria Colonna

The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face

To the River Yvette

The Emperor's Glove

A Ballad of the French Fleet

The Leap of Roushan Beg

Haroun Al Raschid

King Trisanku

A Wraith in the Mist

The Three Kings

Song: Stay, Stay at Home, my Heart, and Rest.

The White Czar

Delia

For other versions of this work, see Birds of Passage (Longfellow poem).

Black shadows fall

From the lindens tall,

That lift aloft their massive wall

Against the southern sky;

And from the realms

Of the shadowy elms

A tide-like darkness overwhelms

The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,

And everywhere

A warm, soft vapor fills the air,

And distant sounds seem near,

And above, in the light

Of the star-lit night,

Swift birds of passage wing their flight

Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat

Of their pinions fleet,

As from the land of snow and sleet

They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry

Of their voices high

Falling dreamily through the sky,

But their forms I cannot see.

O, say not so!

Those sounds that flow

In murmurs of delight and woe

Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs

Of the poet's songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of winged words.

This is the cry

Of souls, that high

On toiling, beating pinions, fly,

Seeking a warmer clime,

From their distant flight

Through realms of light

It falls into our world of night,

With the murmuring sound of rhyme.

Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought

Table of Contents

Of Prometheus, how undaunted

On Olympus' shining bastions

His audacious foot he planted,

Myths are told and songs are chanted,

Full of promptings and suggestions.

Beautiful is the tradition

Of that flight through heavenly portals,

The old classic superstition

Of the theft and the transmission

Of the fire of the Immortals!

First the deed of noble daring,

Born of heavenward aspiration,

Then the fire with mortals sharing,

Then the vulture,--the despairing

Cry of pain on crags Caucasian.

All is but a symbol painted

Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;

Only those are crowned and sainted

Who with grief have been acquainted,

Making nations nobler, freer.

In their feverish exultations,

In their triumph and their yearning,

In their passionate pulsations,

In their words among the nations,

The Promethean fire is burning.

Shall it, then, be unavailing,

All this toil for human culture?

Through the cloud-rack, dark and trailing,

Must they see above them sailing

O'er life's barren crags the vulture?

Such a fate as this was Dante's,

By defeat and exile maddened;

Thus were Milton and Cervantes,

Nature's priests and Corybantes,

By affliction touched and saddened.

But the glories so transcendent

That around their memories cluster,

And, on all their steps attendant,

Make their darkened lives resplendent