Invoking the poet’s own words, Paul Blandford guides visitors through the stately house where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the memorable poems that made him a young nation’s oracular voice.

For 249 years, giants of American history moved through these high-ceilinged rooms looking out its windows across Brattle Street to open fields and the Charles River.

George Washington formed the Continental Army and conducted the Siege of Boston from the spacious first-floor parlor. In his second-floor study, Longfellow composed poems that honored “the voiceless people” like Evangeline, the Indian brave Hiawatha and a brawny blacksmith who labored beneath a “spreading chestnut tree.” Eminent artists like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens and Jenny Lind visited the three-story house with the wide verandas.

Blandford re-animates Longfellow and his times by reciting from memory famous and obscure poems, letters, journal entries and anecdotes about his family and famous house guests.

“I think of this as the house of shadows. To me, there’s nothing like the power of place. There are so many layers to its history,” said Blandford, a 65-year-old Park Ranger for the National Park Service, which owns and manages the house, garden and property at 105 Brattle St., Cambridge. “This isn’t just a job but, first and foremost, my vocation: To bring this house to life by way of the author’s words.”

The site doesn’t open for regular tours until May 1, but it’s now conducting special “Art and Life Are One” tours through April 24.

An industrial relations major in college, Blandford is drawn to the “music” in Longfellow’s poetry. “He always called his own poems ‘songs,”‘ he said.

Delivered in the poet’s signature rhythmic cadences, Blandford’s seemingly impromptu recitations conjure scenes and subjects that moved Longfellow’s readers around the world.

Observing a painting of his three daughters in the dining room, Blandford quoted from “The Children’s Hour” in a clear strong voice.

“Between the dark and the daylight,/When the night is beginning to lower,/ Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,/That is known as the Children’s Hour/ ...From my study I see in the lamplight,/Descending the broad hall stair,/ Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,/And Edith with the golden hair.”

To many visitors, Longfellow is the almost forgotten, white-bearded gent who wrote about Paul Revere’s midnight ride and a few other long poems they had to read in junior high school.

For Blandford, a Vietnam veteran and former insurance executive, Longfellow is a distinctly American bard whose profound sonnets and epic poems celebrate the “role of art in promoting democracy.”

“He was a reformer, an artist and a poet who believed you can’t separate literature and history. His achievement helped spur the age that became known as the American Renaissance,” he said.

More than a house, the Longfellow National Historic Site is a crucible of American history and culture from the Colonial era to modern times.

Also known as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, it was built in 1759 by Royalist John Vassall, a slave-owning sugar planter from Jamaica, in the mid-Georgian style of Southern plantation homes with airy rooms and wide verandas. After the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, it served as George Washington’s headquarters from July 1775 to April 1776.

During guided tours, Blandford points out historic artifacts that were part of Longfellow’s daily life, like the Dutch oven and nearby servants’ bells, a marble bust of Washington, an exotic cigar lighter and sketches by his children.

Pausing before a large mirror, he said, “Think of the faces that have looked into this.”

Blandford points to the chair where legend says Washington silently fumed for 30 minutes because he’d only received 10 barrels of a promised 300 barrels of gunpowder to defend the city. “Washington was right here in this room,” he said.

Blandford describes the terrible day in July 1861 when the author’s second wife, Frances Appleton, “the wind beneath the poet’s wings,” suffered fatal burns over half her body when her dress caught fire as she used hot wax to seal an envelope containing locks of their children’s hair.

Entering the second-floor master bedroom, he stops by the bed where Longfellow’s beloved “Fanny” died the next morning from her injuries. “He hung her portrait facing his bed so it was the last thing he saw every night before he went to sleep,” Blandford said.

A Bowdoin College graduate who taught at Harvard, Longfellow filled several bookcases throughout the house with 11,000 volumes, including leather-bound copies of Greek classics, Goethe, Dante and Schiller.

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, Longfellow became the country’s first literary celebrity for hugely popular poems such as “Evangeline” and “The Song of Hiawatha,” making him, according to Blandford, “almost like the Elvis of his day.”

But not the Elvis of today. In an age of airport best-sellers by Stephen King and Danielle Steel, Blandford frets many people, only vaguely aware of Longfellow’s achievement, pass by the house, again and again without stopping.

“They say ‘Some day I’ll go in there,”‘ he said. “Some day I’ll go in there.”‘

The Longfellow National Historic Site
105 Brattle St., Cambridge.
“Art and Life are One” tours
Through April 24

March 27 and April 27: Paul Blandford: “A tour of Longfellow’s House in Sonnets”
April 3: Jan Buerger: “Art as Symbol in the Longfellow House”
April 10 and April 24: Deb Stein: “A Connoisseur’s Tour of Longfellow House Art”

Admission is $3 and registration is recommended by calling 617-876-4491.