‘Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: / ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep,’” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow proclaims in the tremendous final verse of his 1865 Civil War poem “Christmas Bells.” We tend to forget how significant a figure Longfellow seemed in the 19th century—how significant poetry itself seemed, for that matter. By the 1880s, the poem was a standard in church hymnals and parlor songbooks under the title “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” with a melody by the organist John Baptiste Calkin:...

Source: Wall Street Journal December 14, 2019 04:52 UTC