Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) is one of America’s best-known poets, recognized for his insistent moral tone, sentimentality, and serene idealism. He is best remembered for such poems as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith” (both 1841) and for narrative poems such as “Evangeline” (1847,) “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855,) and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861.)
Longfellow also produced a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1867.) His poems, such as “There was a little girl,” remain familiar to this day as rhymes and melodies.
Longfellow’s prose romance Hyperion (1839,) his tale of a young man who seeks to forget sorrow in travel, was a result of his grief after the death of his first wife in 1835. Longfellow’s creative life was again interrupted by the 1861 death of his second wife, who was burned to death in a domestic accident.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love—the first fluttering of its silken wings—the first rising sound and breath of that wind which is so soon to sweep through the soul, to purify or to destroy.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Love
Magnificent autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds; not like a hermit, clad in gray; but like a warrior with the stain of blood on his brazen mail.—His crimson scarf is rent; his scarlet banner dripping with gore; his step like a flail on the threshing floor.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Autumn, Seasons
The bravest are the tenderest. The loving are the daring.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Courage, Risk, Love
Even He that died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of his mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought,—the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Mother
Love gives itself; it is not bought.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Love
Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Love, Affection, Romance
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Sadness, Remembrance
Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where’er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Pride
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Persistence, Resolve, Success, Great, Body, Perseverance, Endurance
It is an indiscreet and troublesome ambition that cares so much about fame; about what the world says of us; to be always looking in the faces of others for approval; to be always anxious about the effect of what we do or say; to be always shouting to hear the echoes of our own voices.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Fame
Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Thought, Thinking, One liners, Thoughts
What heart has not acknowledged the influence of this hour, the sweet and soothing hour of twilight—the hour of love—the hour of adoration—the hour of rest—when we think of those we love, only to regret that we have not love them more dearly; when we remember our enemies only to forgive them.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A life that is worth writing at all, is worth writing minutely and truthfully.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Biography
Be still, sad heart! And cease repining; behind the clouds is the sun still shining; thy fate is the common fate of all, into each life some rain must fall.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties, Love
By going a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend on the corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution in the dark enigma but the one word, “Providence.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said
Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days
That are no more, and shall no more return.
Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Death, Sympathy, Dying
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Beginnings, Aspirations, Youth, Time
Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Snow
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good,
She was very, very good
But when she was bad she was horrid.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Children
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Respect, Self Respect, Self-respect
A vague recollection fills my mind, an image dazzling, but undefined, like the memory of a gorgeous dream.—It crowds my brain confusedly, but will not stay.—It changes like the tremulous sunshine on the wave, till imagination itself is dazzled, bewildered, over powered.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Ideas
Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Service
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Children
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Socialism, Genius
Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Art
Some must follow and some command, though all are born of clay.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Conceit, Vanity, Pride
It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Time, Integrity, Doing, Reason
Genius is infinite painstaking.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Genius
The history of the past is a mere puppet show.—A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again.—You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again.—And it is all over.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: History
As the turning of logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies will a dull brain.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Study
Resolve and thou art free.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Commitment
We often excuse our own want of philanthropy by giving the name of fanaticism to the more ardent zeal of others.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Fanaticism
Trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment; there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Difficulty, Trouble, Difficulties
You know I say just what I think, and nothing more nor less.—I cannot say one thing and mean another.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Sincerity
All the means of action—the shapeless masses—the materials—lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Genius
And the night shall be filled with music, and the cares, that infest the day, shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Night
Oh, fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong, know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Topics: Adversity, Endurance, Suffering, Difficulties
Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon
Like a magician extended his golden wand o’er the landscape;
Twinkling vapors arose; and sky and water and forest
Seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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