The Golden Legend — Background and Themes

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In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2003 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: American poetry -- 19th century Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 31,486

Reading time 137 min

Text sections 18

This digital edition of The Golden Legend — Background and Themes is described by source-level measurements including 31,486 words, 2 hr 17 min estimated reading time, and 18 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 16.9 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “American poetry -- 19th century,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #10490

Longfellow's verse drama opens with Lucifer's assault on Strasbourg Cathedral, then shifts to Prince Henry's sleepless lament in a Rhine castle. The work moves between sacred and profane scenes, using recurring images of bells, wine, and manuscript illumination to structure a medieval fantasy.

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File: pg10490

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The thought of life that ne'er shall cease Has something in it like despair, A weight I am too weak to bear! Sweeter to this afflicted breast The thought of never-ending rest! Sweeter the undisturbed and deep Tranquillity of endless sleep!

(_A flash of lightning, out of which_ LUCIFER _appears, in the garb of a travelling Physician._)

_Lucifer_. All hail Prince Henry!

_Prince Henry_ (_starting_). Who is it speaks? Who and what are you?

_Lucifer_. One who seeks A moment's audience with the Prince.

_Prince Henry_. When came you in?

_Lucifer_. A moment since. I found your study door unlocked, And thought you answered when I knocked.

_Prince Henry_. I did not hear you.

_Lucifer_. You heard the thunder; It was loud enough to waken the dead. And it is not a matter of special wonder That, when God is walking overhead, You should not have heard my feeble tread.

_Prince Henry_. What may your wish or purpose be?

_Lucifer_. Nothing or everything, as it pleases Your Highness. You behold in me Only a traveling Physician; One of the few who have a mission To cure incurable diseases, Or those that are called so.

_Prince Henry_. Can you bring The dead to life?

_Lucifer_. Yes; very nearly. And, what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your maladies physical and mental, Which neither astonished nor dismayed me. And I hastened hither, though late in the night, To proffer my aid!

_Prince Henry (ironically)_ For this you came! Ah, how can I ever hope to requite This honor from one so erudite?

_Lucifer_. The honor is mine, or will be when I have cured your disease.

_Prince Henry_. But not till then.

_Lucifer_. What is your illness?

_Prince Henry_. It has no name. A smouldering, dull, perpetual flame, As in a kiln, burns in my veins, Sending up vapors to the head, My heart has become a dull lagoon, Which a kind of leprosy drinks and drains; I am accounted as one who is dead, And, indeed, I think that I shall be soon.

_Lucifer_ And has Gordonius the Divine, In his famous Lily of Medicine,-- I see the book lies open before you,-- No remedy potent enough to restore you?

_Prince Henry_. None whatever!

_Lucifer_ The dead are dead, And their oracles dumb, when questioned Of the new diseases that human life Evolves in its progress, rank and rife. Consult the dead upon things that were, But the living only on things that are. Have you done this, by the appliance And aid of doctors?

_Prince Henry_. Ay, whole schools Of doctors, with their learned rules, But the case is quite beyond their science. Even the doctors of Salern Send me back word they can discern No cure for a malady like this, Save one which in its nature is Impossible, and cannot be!

_Lucifer_ That sounds oracular!

_Prince Henry_ Unendurable!

_Lucifer_ What is their remedy?

_Prince Henry_ You shall see; Writ in this scroll is the mystery.

_Lucifer (reading)._ "Not to be cured, yet not incurable! The only remedy that remains Is the blood that flows from a maiden's veins, Who of her own free will shall die, And give her life as the price of yours!" That is the strangest of all cures, And one, I think, you will never try; The prescription you may well put by, As something impossible to find Before the world itself shall end! And yet who knows? One cannot say That into some maiden's brain that kind Of madness will not find its way. Meanwhile permit me to recommend, As the matter admits of no delay, My wonderful Catholicon, Of very subtile and magical powers!

_Prince Henry._ Purge with your nostrums and drugs infernal The spouts and gargoyles of these towers, Not me! My faith is utterly gone In every power but the Power Supernal! Pray tell me, of what school are you?

Continue Reading →

The poem begins not with a character but with a storm and a battle: Lucifer and his spirits try to tear down the cross atop Strasbourg Cathedral. The bells ring Latin phrases—Laudo Deum verum, Plebem voco—and the spirits fail, thwarted by saints and angels. This prologue establishes a pattern of vertical movement, from spire to tower to casement, and a contest between sacred sound and demonic noise.

From that aerial conflict the scene drops to a chamber in the Castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine, where Prince Henry cannot sleep. His monologue, dense with longing for lost friends and past joys, introduces a second structural element: the interior, restless mind. The poem will alternate between such intimate spaces and larger, communal or supernatural settings.

The Bells as Structural Anchors

The bells of Strasbourg Cathedral are not mere background. They speak in Latin, each line a liturgical function: Defunctos ploro (I mourn the dead), Pestem fugo (I put plague to flight), Festa decoro (I adorn feasts). Their chants form a refrain that Lucifer cannot silence. Later, in the cellar scene, the wine cask is described as “silent he seems externally / As any Carthusian monk may be,” but within it seethes. The contrast between outward stillness and inner turbulence echoes the bells’ resistance to the storm. Longfellow uses these repeated sounds—bells, chants, the “aeolian strings” of Henry’s chamber—to mark transitions between the celestial and the earthly, the public and the private.

Wine as a Vehicle for Voice

The cellar scene introduces a speaker who is not named in the excerpts but who handles three casks of wine with ritual care. He praises wines from Bacharach, Hochheim, and Würzburg, and his speech is peppered with local lore: the “blessed wine of the Holy Ghost,” the legend of a boy crucified by Jews in Bacharach. The wine itself becomes a character, described as having “purple hues / Of autumn sunsets on the Rhine.” The speaker’s voice is earthy, comic, and digressive—a sharp contrast to Prince Henry’s melancholy and Lucifer’s grandiosity. This shift in register shows Longfellow’s willingness to move between high and low, sacred and profane, within a single work.

The Scriptorium: Writing Under Duress

Friar Pacificus works by failing light, transcribing the Gospel of John. He pauses before writing the name of the Lord, washing his pen to keep it “pure from blemish and blot.” His labor is physical and spiritual: “Thus have I labored on and on, / Nearly through the Gospel of John.” He then reflects on the Apocalypse, which he calls “the dread Apocalypse,” and imagines it “like the sun in an eclipse.” The scene is quiet, interior, and deliberate—a counterpoint to the storm and the cellar’s bustle. It also introduces the act of writing as a theme. The friar’s careful hand mirrors the poet’s own craft, and the unfinished gospel suggests that the poem itself is a kind of illuminated manuscript, pieced together from disparate voices.

Movement Between Worlds

The excerpts show a work that shifts abruptly from the supernatural to the personal to the mundane. The prologue’s aerial battle gives way to Henry’s chamber, then to a cellar where a wine steward jokes about monks and boots, then to a scriptorium where a friar copies scripture. Each scene is self-contained, almost like a panel in a stained-glass window. The transitions are not explained; the reader is left to infer connections. This structure suggests that Longfellow is less interested in linear narrative than in juxtaposition—sacred vs. profane, noise vs. silence, action vs. contemplation. The poem’s unity comes not from plot but from recurring images: bells, wine, light, and the act of writing.

Because the excerpts cover only the opening sections, the full shape of The Golden Legend remains unclear. The poem may continue to alternate between these modes, or it may develop a more continuous story. Readers should attend to how Longfellow manages transitions between scenes and how the recurring motifs—bells, wine, manuscript—reappear in later parts. The work rewards attention to its crafted surfaces and its deliberate shifts in tone.

There’s a particular ache in Longfellow’s bells—how they carry both prayer and dread across the Rhine. I found myself thinking of that same mournful resonance while leafing through Beechenbrook A Rhyme of the War — A Reader’s Guide, where the quiet tolling feels less like fantasy and more like memory. Some poems just seem to ring a little longer than the last note.