Samuel Longfellow Biography

Samuel Longfellow (1819-1892) was an American clergyman and hymn writer.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine to Stephen and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow; he is the younger brother of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He attended Harvard College and 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. He served as a pastor in Fall River, Massachusetts (1848), Second Unitarian Church (Brooklyn, New York) (1853), and Germantown, Pennsylvania (1860).