19, 1830, in theFamily Reader, which Smith was
editing; three years later when he was collecting
his Jack Downing letters for publication in
book form, Smith found a way to salvage his
‘‘Biography of Sam Patch.’’ It was possible to
draw a parallel between the career of Sam, who
rose to fame by jumping small falls and gradu-
ally rising to the conquest of Niagara, and the
political office-jumping of Jack. With this con-
nection, Smith attributed the ballad to Jack
Downing and inserted it in hisLife and Writings.
Even citizens of Portland not usually moved
to verse might on special occasions turn off a
ballad. When Joshua Leavitt lost his ten-year-
old son in 1828, he gave his grief outlet in a
fifteen-stanza broadside which was distributed
with copies of the religious journal, theChristian
Intelligencer. This link between grief, religion,
and the ballad has been noted before in the
work of Thomas Shaw and Ebenezer Robbins,
and it would be possible to trace the connections
between the writing of ballads and the writing of
hymns. With varying degrees of literary merit
both forms are aimed at a popular audience
and both often used the same meters.
A collection of such ballad-like hymns was
published in Portland in 1817 by one T. Wolcott.
His Selection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs,
issued as a sixteen-page pamphlet from the press
of A. and J. Shirley, may have come under the eye
of young Henry Longfellow. We know from an
article by Lawrance Thompson that the poet-to-
be was interested in ballad literature, drawing,
indeed, the idea for his first published poem
from an existing ballad of Lovell’s pond. This
‘‘original sin of imitation’’ was not Longfellow’s
last; his eclectic poetry is filled with reminiscences
of his reading. Since the boyhood reading of any
man is apt to remain with him longer and deeper
than any subsequent reading, we can expect the
images and ideas an author met in youth to reap-
pear, often metamorphosed, in later years. I sug-
gest that Longfellow, whose art ballads have
become a part of American folklore, uncon-
sciously learned much of his craft from the bal-
lads and hymns of his Portland days. Certainly
‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ belongs squarely in
the tradition of shipwreck ballads; and in an even
more concrete way, ballad techniques and images
contributed to Longfellow’s later verse. There is
more than accidental similarity between the
opening of Wolcott’s hymn ‘‘Experience,’’ with its
Young people all I pray draw near
Listen a while and you shall hear...
and Longfellow’sListen, my children, and you shall hear...
And the germ of the idea for the famous
conclusion to ‘‘The Building of the Ship,’’ with
its comparison of the Union to a ship, may well
have first been planted by Wolcott’s hymn
commencing
Like a ship see the church thro’ the ocean
she rolls
Well ballast with grace and man’d out with
live souls,
’Midst whirlwinds and tempests she sails
thro’ the world,
While storms of temptations against her are
hurl’d.
It is true, of course, that ship-imagery came
naturally to any New England writer of the
Republic, but the two Wolcott passages taken
together make the conjecture more certain that
Longfellow owed a deep and basic debt to ballads
and hymns encountered in his youth. His later,
more literary, borrowings of ideas, themes, phrases
are of greater importance, but underlying them is
the ballad heritage. Both his power and popularity
are grounded in the ballad, for it is as a storyteller
in verse, a minstrel with a song to sing and a tale to
tell, that he first gained a wide audience and that he
is remembered and read today.
When this connection is understood, the
study of local ballads ceases to be mere antiquar-
ianism and assumes a rightful, if minor, place in
the process of understanding the poets of Amer-
ica’s renaissance of the 1840’s and 1850’s. In
themselves the early ballads of Portland are sel-
dom interesting, but as a folk-root of culture
they are important. Their twofold influence—
inwardly upon the budding poets and outwardly
upon the general mass of readers—can hardly be
exaggerated.
Source:Donald A. Sears, ‘‘Folk Poetry in Longfellow’s
Boyhood,’’ inNew England Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1,
March 1972, pp. 96–105.SOURCESArvin, Newton,Longfellow: His Life and Work, Little,
Brown, 1963, pp. 69–70.
Felton, C. C., ‘‘Longfellow’sBallads and Other Poems,’’
inNineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 2, Gale
Research, 1982; originally published inNorth American
Review, Vol. 55, No. 116, July 1842, pp. 114–44.
Hirsh, Edward L., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
University of Minnesota Press, 1964.The Wreck of the Hesperus