As I went through the revision of Sva-likhita-jīvanī , I spent a lot of time putting in footnotes, since I recognized that many of the names would be unfamiliar to readers, especially his Bengali contemporaries. Of course, these notes are brief and in some cases entirely inadequate. Here is one, for instance, that simply could not have been included in full, so I thought I would put it here. When Bhaktivinoda Thakur's first wife died in 1861, he writes that this poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped him. "I endured this grief like a warrior according to the 'Psalm of Life'." No doubt it was Rev. Dall (also a New Englander) who introduced BVT to Longfellow). Somewhat ironically, it seems that it was the New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists who appealed the most to Bhaktivinoda rather than their British equivalents like Wordsworth. I think that Longfellow's lyrical style appealed to him more. I think that anyone reading this and knowing t...
