Just Because: 'Holidays'

As this particular holiday season comes to an end and we return to the business of everyday life (and not to be too Pollyannaish about this or anything, but ... ), it might do us well to remember, every once in a while, that we don't need a calendar to dictate our holidays. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) certainly believed that. One of the most-loved American poets of his age, Longfellow was one of the five so-called Fireside Poets (the others being William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell). Although he was tremendously popular both in the States and abroad, he also had his critics, who mostly decried what they felt was his imitative style and a certain lack of substance. Among his most famous poems are Paul Revere's Ride and The Song of Hiawatha. What may be less well-known is that he was the first American to translate Dante's Divine Comedy. from Poem-a-Day:

The holiest of all holidays are those
   Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
   The secret anniversaries of the heart,
   When the full river of feeling overflows;—
The happy days unclouded to their close;
   The sudden joys that out of darkness start
   As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
   Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
   White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
   White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;—a Fairy Tale
   Of some enchanted land we know not where,
   But lovely as a landscape in a dream.