Tales of a Wayside Inn

On an autumn night in Sudbury, Massachusetts, six guests and their landlord settle by the fire of an old colonial tavern with a red horse on its weathered sign, and each takes a turn telling a story in verse. Longfellow borrowed the frame from Chaucer, but the material roams: the midnight alarm of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a Norse chronicle in twenty-two parts as “The Saga of King Olaf,” a Boccaccio tale of a ruined nobleman and his last falcon, a grim episode of Inquisition Spain in “Torquemada,” and a Connecticut town that learns what follows when it kills off its songbirds. This 1863 volume is Part First, where “Paul Revere’s Ride” reached book form after its magazine run, and it closes with a group of lyrics titled “Birds of Passage: Flight the Second.” The interludes keep the talk unhurried.