Samuel Longfellow

Samuel Longfellow was an American Unitarian minister, hymn writer, editor, and religious poet born in Portland, Maine, in 1819. The youngest child of Stephen and Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow and the younger brother of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he graduated from Harvard College in 1839 and Harvard Divinity School in 1846. His theological formation was influenced by the liberal and Transcendental currents of New England Unitarianism.

Longfellow served congregations in Fall River, Massachusetts, Brooklyn, New York, and Germantown, Pennsylvania, while also preaching widely, traveling, and writing. With his Harvard Divinity School classmate Samuel Johnson he edited “A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion” and the influential “Hymns of the Spirit” of 1864. His other hymn texts include “Holy Spirit, Truth Divine,” “Again, as Evening's Shadow Falls,” and “Now on Land and Sea Descending.” He also prepared a major biography of his brother Henry.

In 1886 Longfellow wrote a four-stanza hymn for the dedication of the Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. The brief text now known as “Bless Thou the Gifts” is the final stanza of that larger hymn, later detached and widely used as an offertory or dedication response.