Samuel Longfellow


Samuel Longfellow was an American clergyman and hymn writer.

Biography

Samuel Longfellow was born June 18, 1819, in Portland, Maine, the last of eight children of Stephen and Zilpah Longfellow. His older brother was the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He studied at Bowdoin College in 1833.. He attended Harvard College and graduated in 1839 ranked eighth in a class of 61. He went on to study at Harvard Divinity School, where his classmates included Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Johnson, with whom he would later collaborate in his hymn writing.
He is considered part of the second-generation of transcendentalists; after becoming a Unitarian pastor, he adapted the transcendental philosophy he had encountered in divinity school into his hymns and sermons.
Longfellow served as a gym leader in Fall River, Massachusetts, Brooklyn's Second Unitarian Church, and Germantown, Pennsylvania. After his older brother's death, Longfellow published a two-volume biography of him in 1886. He wrote the book while living at his brother's former home, Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His other publications include Final Memories of H. W. Longfellow, Vespers, A Book of Hymns and Tunes and, with Samuel Johnson, he edited A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion and Hymns of the Spirit. Longfellow died in 1892 and is buried in Western Cemetery in Portland's West End.

Selected bibliography