It was just the home for our poet.  Its windows looked out upon one of the loveliest landscapes in New England, with the bright river winding through the broad meadow beyond the house, and the blue Milton Hills dotting the distant background.  The bright verdure of New England sparkled on every side, and the stately old elms that stood guard by the house screened it from the prying eyes of the passers on the public road.  The whole place was hallowed to its new inmate by the memories of the brave soldiers, wise statesmen, and brilliant ladies who had graced its heroic age, and of which the stately hostess was the last and worthy representative.  The old house was as serene and still as the dearest lover of quiet could wish.  The mistress lived quite apart from her lodger, and left him to follow the bent of his own fancies; and rare fancies they were, for it was of them that some of his best works were born in this upper chamber.  Here he wrote “Hyperion,” in 1838 and 1839.  Its publication, which was undertaken by John Owen, the University publisher in Cambridge, marked an era in American literature.  Every body read the book, and every body talked of it.  It was a poem in prose, and none the less the work of a poet because professedly “a romance of travel.”  The young read it with enthusiasm, and it sent hundreds to follow Paul Flemming’s footsteps in the distant Fatherland, where the “romance of travel” became their guidebook.  The merchant and the lawyer, the journalist and the mechanic, reading its pages, found that the stern realities of life had not withered up all the romance of their natures, and under its fascinations they became boys again.  Even Horace Greeley, that most practical and unimaginative of men, became rapturous over it.  It was a great success, and established the poet’s fame beyond all question, and since then its popularity has never waned.

In 1840, he published the “Voices of the Night,” which he had heard sounding to him in his haunted chamber.  This was his first volume, and its popularity was even greater than that of “Hyperion,” although some of the poems had appeared before, in the “Knickerbocker Magazine.”  In 1841, he published his volume of “Ballads, and Other Poems,” which but added to his fame, and the next year bade the old house under the elms a temporary adieu, and sailed for Europe, where he passed the summer on the Rhine.  On the voyage home, he composed his “Poems on Slavery,” and soon after his return wrote “The Spanish Student,” a drama, “which smells of the utmost South, and was a strange blossoming for the garden of Thomas Tracy.”