A man who had been very unlucky, an old classmate of Sumner’s, went to his office to prove some debts in bankruptcy. Sumner asked him what he read. He replied that he read very little; that he hardly found anything that was written from the heart and was really true. “Have you read Longfellow’s Hyperion?” Sumner asked him. “Yes,” he replied, “and I admire it very much; I think it a very great book.” He then added in a very solemn manner, “I think I may say that Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’ saved me from suicide. I first found it on a scrap of newspaper, in the hands of two Irish women, soiled and worn; and I was at once touched by it.” The Chinese translator and noted scholar, Tung Tajen, a great admirer of Longfellow, sent the poet a Chinese fan, upon which was inscribed in Chinese characters a translation of the “Psalm of Life.” The fan is one of the folding kind, and the characters are inscribed on it in vertical columns. An Englishman serving on the staff of the American minister in China found this beautiful poem in Chinese and translated it back into English, not knowing that it had been written originally in English. Here is a verse of the translation he made. You will scarcely recognize the familiar— Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. AS TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE. Do not manifest your discontent in a piece of verse: A hundred years (of life) are, in truth, as one asleep (so soon are they gone); The short dream (early death), the long dream (death after long life), alike are dreams (so little is the body concerned; after death) There still remains the spirit (which is able to) fill the universe. The words in parenthesis were not in the Chinese and the translator supplied them to complete the sense in English. CHAPTER XI HOW SOME OF THE GREAT POEMS WERE WRITTEN We have already often spoken of the “Psalm of Life,” perhaps the greatest poem Longfellow ever wrote. He composed it in his room at the Craigie House, which had been Washington’s chamber. The death of his young wife had afflicted him deeply, and one day as he sat between two windows, looking sadly out, this poem came into his mind and he wrote it. For a long time no one knew of its existence, and it was not until many months later that he sent it to be published. “The Reaper and the Flowers” was written in much the same way, and “The Light of Stars” was composed on a serene and beautiful summer evening, exactly suggestive of the poem. Longfellow himself tells how “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was written. Says he: