The Italian sonnet "Mezzo Cammin" borrows its title from the opening line of Dante’s Inferno, which Longfellow himself translated as "Midway upon the journey of our life." Both poets use this metaphor to describe the age of thirty-five, the halfway point in the Bible's allotted span of human life, "three-score years and ten." In "Mezzo Cammin," Longfellow grieves not only for his first wife's death — "sorrow, and a care that almost killed" — but also for his failure to achieve his literary ambitions. Eighteen years after his second wife's shocking death, Longfellow's anguish remains fresh in the sonnet titled "The Cross of Snow." Despite the enormous popularity of this first poet-professor of the nineteenth century, these two posthumously published sonnets suggest the intensely private life he kept inside, as he once expressed in a letter: "With me, all deep feelings are silent ones.