f a reef--"Norman's Woe"--where
many of them took place. It was written one night between twelve and
three, and cost the poet, he said, "hardly an effort." Indeed, it is
the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow's
lines, which are their best technical quality. There is nothing
obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little passion or
intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often a
very high order of imagination and almost invariably the choice of the
right word. In this volume were also included the _Village Blacksmith_
and _Excelsior_. The latter, and the _Psalm of Life_, have had a
"damnable iteration" which causes them to figure as Longfellow's most
popular {481} pieces. They are by no means, however, among his best.
They are vigorously expressed commonplaces of that hortatory kind which
passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of preaching.

In the _Belfry of Bruges_ and the _Seaside and the Fireside_, the
translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were the
_Occultation of Orion_--the most imaginative of all Longfellow's poems;
_Seaweed_, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite _Old Clock on the
Stairs_, the _Building of the Ship_, with its magnificent closing
apostrophe to the Union, and the _Fire of Driftwood_, the subtlest in
feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these were verses
of a more familiar quality, such as the _Bridge_, _Resignation_, and
the _Day Is Done_, and many others, all reflecting moods of gentle and
pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend
lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed with perfect art.
Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its beautiful side.
Longfellow was all poet. Like Ophelia in _Hamlet_,

"Thought and affection, passion, hell itself,
_He_ turns to favor and to prettiness."

He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the age. The
transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his head and left him
undisturbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly distaste which the
cultivated class in America had {482} already begun to entertain. In
1842 he printed a small volume of _Poems on Slavery_, which drew
commendation from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of
Whittier's or Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is
interesting to compare his journals with Hawthorne's _American Note
Books_ and to