Three later collections, Ballads and Other Poems, 1842, The Belfry of Bruges, 1846; and The Seaside and the Fireside, 1850, comprise most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow’s minor poetry.  The first of these embraced, together with some renderings from the German and the Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original work than the author had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hesperus.  The former of these, written in the swift leaping meter of Drayton’s Ode to the Cambro Britons on their Harp, was suggested by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall River—­a circumstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the Hesperus was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef—­“Norman’s Woe”—­where many of them took place.  It was written one night between twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, “hardly an effort.”  Indeed, it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow’s lines, which are their best technical quality.  There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry.  If there is little passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often a very high order of imagination, and almost invariably the choice of the right word.  In this volume were also included The Village Blacksmith and Excelsior.  The latter, and the Psalm of Life, have had a “damnable iteration” which causes them to figure as Longfellow’s most popular pieces.  They are by no means, however, among his best.  They are vigorously expressed common-places of that hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of preaching.

In The Belfry of Bruges and The Seaside and the Fireside the translations were still kept up, and among the original pieces were The Occupation of Orion—­the most imaginative of all Longfellow’s poems; Seaweed, which has very noble stanzas, the favorite Old Clock on the Stairs, The Building of the Ship, with its magnificent closing apostrophe to the Union, and The Fire of Driftwood, the subtlest in feeling of any thing that the poet ever wrote.  With these were verses of a more familiar quality, such as The Bridge, Resignation, and The Day Is Done, and many others, all reflecting moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed with perfect art.  Like Keats, he apprehended every thing on its beautiful side.  Longfellow was all poet.  Like Ophelia in Hamlet,

  “Thought and affection, passion, hell itself,
  He turns to favor and to prettiness.”