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June 23 [1831]. I can almost fancy myself in Spain, the morning is so soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild brier and the mock orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun.
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I find that it requires little courage to publish grammars and school-books; but in the department of fine writing--or attempts at fine writing--it requires vastly more. As a matter of fact, he had already published preliminary sketches of
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Outre-Mer in the
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New England Magazine, a Boston periodical just undertaken, putting them under the rather inappropriate title of
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The Schoolmaster, the first appearing in the number for July 18, 1831,{16} and the sixth and last in the number for February, 1833.{17} He writes to his sister (July 17, 1831),
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I hereby send you a magazine for your amusement. I wrote 'The Schoolmaster' and the translation from Luis de Gongora. {18} It is worth mentioning that he adds,
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Read 'The Late Joseph Natterstrom.' It is good. This was a story by William Austin, whose
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Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, has just been mentioned as an early landmark of the period.{19} It is fair to say, however, that the critic of to-day can hardly see in these youthful pages any promise of the Longfellow of the future. The opening chapter, describing the author as a country schoolmaster, who plays with his boys in the afternoon, is only a bit of Irving diluted,--the later papers,
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A Walk in Normandy,
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The Village of Auteuil, etc., carrying the thing somewhat farther, but always in the same rather thin vein. Their quality of crudeness was altogether characteristic of the period, and although Holmes and Whittier tried their 'prentice hands with the best intentions in the same number of the
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New England Magazine, they could not raise its level. We see in these compositions, as in the
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Annuals of that day, that although Hawthorne had begun with his style already formed, yet that of Longfellow was still immature. This remark does not, indeed, apply to a version of a French drinking song,{20} which exhibits something of his later knack at such renderings. There was at any rate some distinct maturity in the first number of
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Outre-Mer, which appeared in 1835. A notice of this book in the London
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Spectator closed with this expression of judgment:
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Either the author of the 'Sketch Book' has received a warning, or there are two Richmonds in the field.
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Outre-Mer and a page of the
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Sketch Book, taking in each case the first American editions. Irving's books were printed by C. S. Van Winkle, New York, and Longfellow's by J. Griffin, Brunswick, Maine; the latter bearing the imprint of Hilliard, Gray & Co., Boston, and the former of the printer only. Yet the physical appearance of the two sets of books is almost identical; the typography, distribution into chapters, the interleaved titles of these chapters, and the prefix to each chapter of a little motto, often in a foreign language. It must be remembered that the
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Sketch Book, like
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Outre-Mer, was originally published in numbers; and besides all this the literary style of Longfellow's work was at this time so much like that of Irving that it is very hard at first to convince the eye that Irving is not responsible for all. Yet for some reason or other the early copies of the
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Sketch Book command no high price at auction, while at the recent sale of Mr. Arnold's collection in New York the two parts of
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Outre-Mer brought $310. The work is now so rare that the library of Harvard University has no copy of the second part, and only an imperfect copy of the first with several pages mutilated, but originally presented to Professor Felton by the author and bearing his autograph. As to style, it is unquestionable that in
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Outre-Mer we find Washington Irving frankly reproduced, while in
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Hyperion
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Outre-Mer are written in real or assumed ignorance of the author's name and almost always with some reference to Irving. Thus there is a paper in the
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North American Review for October, 1834, by the Rev. O. W. B. Peabody, who says of the book that it is
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He continues,
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It is a form which, as every reader knows, had been recommended by the high example and success of Mr. Irving.... It is not to be supposed that in adopting the form of Mr. Irving, the author has been guilty of any other imitation. {21} This may in some sense be true, and yet it is impossible to compare the two books without seeing that kind of assimilation which is only made more thorough by being unconscious. Longfellow, even thus early, brought out more picturesquely and vividly than Irving the charm exerted by the continent of Europe over the few Americans who were exploring it. What Irving did in this respect for England, Longfellow did for the continental nations. None of the first German students from America, Ticknor, Cogswell, Everett, or Bancroft, had been of imaginative temperament, and although their letters, as since printed,{22} revealed Germany to America as the land of learning, it yet remained for Longfellow to portray all Europe from the point of view of the pilgrim. When he went to England in 1835, as we shall see, he carried with him for English publication the two volumes of one of the earliest literary tributes paid by the New World to the Old,
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Outre-Mer.
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The Token, published in Boston and edited by S. G. Goodrich. This annual was the first of a series undertaken in America, on the plan of similar volumes published under many names in England. It has a permanent value for literary historians in this country as containing many of Hawthorne's
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Twice-Told Tales in their original form, but often left anonymous, and sometimes signed only by his initial (H.). In the list of his own early publications given by Longfellow to George W. Greene under date of March 9, 1833, he includes,
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To identify the contributions thus affords a curious literary puzzle. The first named volume--
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The Token for 1832--contains the tale of a domestic bereavement under the name of
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The Indian Summer; this has for a motto a passage from
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The Maid's Tragedy, and the whole story is signed with the initial
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L. This would seem naturally to suggest Longfellow, and is indeed almost conclusive. Yet curiously enough there is in the same volume a short poem called
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La Doncella, translated from the Spanish and signed
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L...., which is quite in the line of the Spanish versions he was then writing, although not included in Mr. Scudder's list of his juvenile or unacknowledged poems. To complicate the matter still farther, there is also a story called
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David Whicher, dated Bowdoin College, June 1, 1831, this being a period when Longfellow was at work there, and yet this story is wholly remote in style from
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The Indian Summer, being a rather rough and vernacular woodman's tale. Of the two,
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The Indian Summer seems altogether the more likely to be his work, and indeed bears a distinct likeness to the equally tragic tale of
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Jacqueline in
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Outre-Mer,