writings,
that have been circulated among readers of all classes in America and
England, have brought with them.

Three later collections, _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842, _The Belfry
of Bruges_, 1846; and _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850, comprise
most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of
these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the
Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the
author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of _The
Skeleton in Armor_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. The former of
these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton's _Ode to the
Cambro Britons on their Harp_, was suggested by the digging up of a
mail-clad skeleton at Fall River--a circumstance which the poet linked
with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to
the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea.
_The Wreck of the Hesperus_ was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on
the coast near Gloucester and by the name of 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 pieces. They are by no means, however, among
his best. They are vigorously expressed common-places 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 Occupation 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
w