sity as to the precise manner in which
each favorite poem by a favorite author comes into existence. In the
case of Longfellow we find this illustrated only here and there. We know
that "The Arrow and the Song," for instance, came into his mind
instantaneously; that "My Lost Youth" occurred to him in the night,
after a day of pain, and was written the next morning; that on December
17, 1839, he read of shipwrecks reported in the papers and of bodies
washed ashore near Gloucester, one lashed to a piece of the wreck, and
that he wrote, "There is a reef called Norman's Woe where many of these
took place; among others the schooner Hesperus. Also the Sea-Flower on
Black Rock. I must write a ballad upon this; also two others,--'The
Skeleton in Armor' and 'Sir Humphrey Gilbert.'" A fortnight later he sat
at twelve o'clock by his fire, smoking, when suddenly it came into his
mind to write the Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus, which he says, "I
accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts
were running in my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. It was
three by the clock. I then went to bed and fell asleep. I feel pleased
with the ballad. It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come into my
mind by lines, but by stanzas." A few weeks before, taking up a volume
of Scott's "Border Minstrelsy," he had received in a similar way the
suggestion of "The Beleaguered City" and of "The Luck of Edenhall."

We know by Longfellow's own statement to Mr. W. C. Lawton,{102} that it
was his rule to do his best in polishing a poem before printing it, but
afterwards to leave it untouched, on the principle that "the readers of
a poem acquired a right to the poet's work in the form they had learned
to love." He thought also that Bryant and Whittier hardly seemed happy
in these belated revisions, and mentioned especially Bryant's
"Water-Fowl,"

"As darkly limned upon the ethereal sky,"

where Longfellow preferred the original reading "painted on." It is,
however, rare to find a poet who can carry out this principle of
abstinence, at least in his own verse, and we know too surely that
Longfellow was no exception; thus we learn that he had made important
alterations in the "Golden Legend" within a few weeks of publication.
These things show that his remark to Mr. Lawton does not tell quite the
whole story. As with most poets, his alterations were not always
improvements. Thus, in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," he made