8

636 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

Massachusetts, where he accepted the Smith professorship of French and Spanish at
Harvard College. Early in his career, Longfellow published translations of foreign
works, and by 1833 he had received considerable publishing success with his own
prose and poetry. He was catapulted to literary stardom with the appearance of his
prose romance Hyperion in 1839. In 1842 he published Poems on Slavery, a volume
of poetry that made an important contribution to the antislavery movement. Over a
long and highly productive career, Longfellow authored countless collections of
poetry and prose. He is best remembered for his epic-style poem The Song of
Hiawatha (1855), in which he portrayed Native Americans with dignity and respect;
and The Courtship ol Miles Standish (1858), treating the life and adventures of the
Pilgrim leader. Cecil B. Williams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York, 1964),
139-40; Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston, 1963), 77-78; James
D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed. (New York, 1995),
387-88; ACAB, 4:10-15; DAB, 11:382-87; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes,
eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, 1999), 13:886-89.
5.9 Village Blacksmith] "The Village Blacksmith" appears in Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems (1841). The eight-stanza poem describes a
village blacksmith and his simple yet exemplary life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow; ed. H[orace] E. Scudder (Boston, 1922),
14-15; Hart, Oxford Companion to American Literature, 693.
5.10-11 "Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose."]
The final two lines of the seventh stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The
Village Blacksmith." Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 15.
5.24 Macaulay] Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), British writer,
parliamentarian, and bureaucrat in India, found great popularity as a historian during
the nineteenth century. In the 1820s his essays, primarily book reviews, began appearing
in the Whig Edinburgh Review, and the success of these works led Macaulay to
devote much of his life to writing the five-volume History of England from the
Accession of James II (1848-61). The endeavor required years of labor but garnered
him even greater acclaim, and he became a best-selling author in the United States as
well as in the British Empire. Critics point to the whiggish slant in Macaulay's interpretation,
but nearly all admit his talent for narrative and the fundamental accuracy of
his work. Boyd, Encyclopedia of Historians, 2:746-47; Cannon, Blackwell Dictionary
of Historians, 259-60; DNB, 12:410-18.
5.25-27 a copy of...history we have] Ruffin seems to have erred in this attribution
to Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), English historian, poet, and Whig
member of Parliament, DNB, 12:410-18.
5.31 Col. Lloyd's plantation] Edward Lloyd V (1779-1834) of Wye House was
the scion of Talbot County's first family. One of the state's largest landowners and
slave owners, he was also Maryland's most successful wheat grower and cattle raiser
of his era. As a charter member of the Maryland Agricultural Society, a founder of at
least two banks, and a speculator in coal mines, he became the wealthiest of a long