“This is one of the poems which I like to recall. It floats in my mind again and again, whenever I read of some of our frightful storms on the coast. Away back in the year when the ‘Voices of the Night’ was published, in the closing month of the year, the New England coast was lashed by a terrible tempest: and there were numerous shipwrecks recorded. I remember reading in the newspapers one day of the loss of a schooner on the reef of Norman’s Woe, called ‘The Hesperus.’ Norman’s Woe is, as you are aware, a frowning mass of rocks, surrounded by the ocean, not far from Gloucester. It occurred to me to write a ballad, which I did some days afterwards, while I was sitting alone one night by the fire in the room above.” The fact is, after writing part of it he went to bed, and being unable to sleep, got up and wrote the remainder. “Excelsior” probably stands next to the “Psalm of Life” as a popular favorite. One evening, also in that chamber of Washington’s at the Craigie House, after he had been at a party, Longfellow caught sight of this word on a torn piece of newspaper. Lying near was a letter from Charles Sumner, and immediately he began to write on the back of this, crowding the stanzas in as best he could. Later he carefully rewrote the poem, and changed it in many parts. The next time Sumner visited the Craigie House he was shown the letter, and he asked to have it back. Longfellow gave it him, and Sumner always kept it as a treasure. When he died he left it by will to Harvard College. Once in answer to a letter Longfellow gave the following explanation of the meaning of the poem: “My intention in writing it was no more than to display, in a series of pictures, the life of a man of genius, resisting all temptations, laying aside all fears, heedless of all warnings, and pressing right on to accomplish his purpose. His motto is ‘Excelsior’—higher. He passes through the Alpine village, through the rough, cold paths of the world, where the peasants cannot understand him, and where his watchword is ‘an unknown tongue.’ He disregards the happiness of domestic peace, and sees the glaciers—his fate—before him. He disregards the warnings of the old man’s wisdom and the fascinations of woman’s love. He answers to all, ‘Higher yet!’ The monks of St. Bernard are the representatives of religious forms and ceremonies; and with their oft-repeated prayer mingles the sound of his voice, telling them there is something higher than forms or ceremonies. Filled with these aspirations, he pushes forward; and the voice heard in the air is the promise of immortality and progress ever upward, without having reached the perfection he longed for.”