04/26/2026
Let Henry Longfellow pick your next favorite poem. For , we're highlighting volumes of poetry in the site's collection owned by Henry W. Longfellow.
As April and come to a close, we look ahead to the next season with Roadside Poems for Summer Travelers. Editor Lucy Larcom (who had become a well-known writer while working in the textile mills at Lowell National Historical Park) wrote “A little book filled with sky and mountain glimpses, the sound of running waters and rustling trees, and wafts of fragrance from field and woodland, is scarcely out of place anywhere among poetry-lovers in the summertime.” Unsurprisingly, given the strength of his nature poetry, the small volume includes six poems by Longfellow.
This extract, from “Our Daily Paths,” comes from a slightly earlier English author, Mrs. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835). Henry Longfellow read her work as a young man, with mixed opinion: “I think she possesses great genius, and great power of over language… but of late, by her own carelessness, she has fallen short of her own excellence. Moreover, she has introduced into modern poetry a hop, skip, and jump kind of measure, which has had, in my humble opinion, a very deleterious influence in our own country.”
What do you think – is “Our Daily Paths” genius or too “sing-song”?
There's Beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes Can trace it 'midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise; We may find it where a hedgerow showers its blossoms o'er our way, Or a cottage-window sparkles forth in the last red light of day. We may find it where a spring shines clear, beneath an aged tree, With the foxglove o'er the water's glass borne downwards by the bee; Or where a swift and sunny gleam on the birchen-stems is thrown, As a soft wind playing parts the leaves, in copses green and lone. We may find it in the winter boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky, While soft on icy pool and stream their pencilled shadows lie, When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frost-work bound, Whence the flitting redbreast shakes a shower of crystals to the ground.
