Samuel Longfellow was an American teacher, clergyman, poet, and philosopher.
Background
Samuel Longfellow was the youngest son of Stephen and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow and was born on June 18, 1819 in Portland, Maine, United States. His early boyhood was made happy by the enjoyment of imaginative literature and by his rare sensitiveness to the beauty of his seashore home where he rambled, botanizing and sketching.
Education
Samuel Longfellow attended classes at Portland Academy. Later he went to Harvard College, where from 1835 to 1839 he stood high in studies and enjoyed many intimate friendships. Later he entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1842 and shared with a gifted group of students including T. W. Higginson, O. B. Frothingham, and Samuel Johnson an enthusiasm for the new thought of "Transcendentalism" and with whom he would later collaborate in his hymn writing.
Career
In 1839-1840 Longfellow taught in a family school at Elkridge, Maryland, then returned to Cambridge, where he acted as college proctor, cultivated his love of music, and tutored young boys for college entrance. For the latter task he had unusual aptitude through his remarkable understanding and affection for the young and his power to kindle their moral aims. In 1843 he worked as a tutor in Horta, Fayal, to the children of the American consul, Charles Dabney. Later he collaborated with Samuel Johnson and published his A Book of Hymns, for Public and Private Devotion (1846, 1848), which gave prominence to the new hymnody of Whittier, H. B. Stowe, Jones Very, and Theodore Parker.
On grounds of health he at first declined a settled pastorate but after temporary engagements in West Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D. C. , he was ordained to the Unitarian ministry in Fall River, Massachusetts, February 16, 1848. His spiritual discourse, his beautiful voice, together with the charm that made the children gather round him, won him high esteem, but discouraged by what he deemed inadequate success he withdrew, June 18, 1851, and spent a year in England and France as companion and tutor of a young student. Suspicion of his religious views, then deemed radical, delayed parochial appointment and he thought of serving as chaplain in prisons or reform schools, but in April 1853 he was summoned by the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, New York, where his nature and talent came to full expression.
In 1959 he published the work His Vespers (1859) which contained his own beautiful vesper hymns. With equal stress on the social service of the church he sought to organize his parish for the study of social problems and to diffuse a love of art and literature. Another decline in health and some protest against his utterances concerning slavery led to his resignation in June 1860.
After two years of extensive travel in Europe he returned to Cambridge, preaching (1867 - 1868) to the congregation gathered by Theodore Parker, traveling abroad again in 1865 and 1868, writing powerful theological essays for the Radical edited by Sidney H. Morse. Once more he was a settled pastor, serving the Unitarian church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, from January 1878 to the summer of 1882 when he sought leisure for writing in Cambridge. He published in 1886 a two-volume biography of his brother, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and in the following year he published a sequel, Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Views
Longfellow was an adherent of transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. He believed that society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, and that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. He was also a pacifist, and a supporter of women’s rights.
Personality
Longfellow was a man with serene spirit and social charm.