Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

He pursued his literary goals by submitting poetry and prose to various newspapers and magazines partly due to encouragement from a professor named Thomas Cogswell Upham. When the younger Fanny was born on April 7 1847 Dr. His publiHenry Wadsworth Longfellowd poetry shows great versatility using anapestic and trochaic forms blank verse heroic couplets ballads and sonnets.

He has been criticized however for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses. His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835 after a miscarriage. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and was one of the five Fireside Poets.