“Midnight! the outpost of advancing day!The frontier town and citadel of night!The watershed of Time, from which the streamsOf Yesterday and To-morrow take their way,One to the land of promise and of light,One to the land of darkness and of dreams!”

American poet and educator

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. He became one of the best-known literary figures of 19th-century New England, and is remembered for poems such as "Paul Revere's Ride," The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He also made a notable contribution as a translator, becoming the first American to complete a translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. He is associated with the fireside poets, a group whose work reached a wide domestic audience in its time.