Samuel Longfellow

Samuel Longfellow (1819–1892) was an American Unitarian minister, hymn writer, editor, biographer, and religious liberal whose work joined congregational song with the reform-minded currents of nineteenth-century New England. Born in Portland, Maine, on June 18, 1819, he was the youngest child of Stephen and Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow and the younger brother of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1839, and later studied at Harvard Divinity School. During a break in his theological studies he spent 1843–1844 in the Azores as tutor to the children of American consul Charles Dabney.

Longfellow entered the Unitarian ministry after completing his divinity studies. His early clerical work included West Cambridge and Fall River, Massachusetts, followed by a Brooklyn, New York, pastorate beginning in 1853. He left Brooklyn in 1860 and spent much of the next two decades preaching for New England congregations, later serving the liberal religious society at Germantown, Pennsylvania, from 1878 to 1882. The National Park Service documents his public commitments to abolition, pacifism, and women's rights as part of his broader religious and social outlook.

Hymnody was central to Longfellow's literary ministry. With his close colleague Samuel Johnson he edited A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion and the influential Hymns of the Spirit (1864); he also published Vespers and later hymn-and-tune collections. His texts include "Again as Evening's Shadow Falls," "Now on Land and Sea Descending," "Holy Spirit, Truth Divine," "I Look to Thee in Every Need," and "One Holy Church of God Appears." After his brother Henry's death, Longfellow also devoted major effort to editing family papers and producing The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Final Memorials. He died in Portland on October 3, 1892.