Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is portrayed in a powerful close bust cabinet card by Warren's Portraits, 465 Washington Street, Boston, showing the poet in his final years in a composition of striking immediacy. Longfellow faces the camera in a near-frontal three-quarter view, his full white beard spreading across the lower frame and his white hair swept back in loose waves, his deep-set eyes directed toward the camera with an expression of calm gravity beneath a furrowed brow. He wears a dark frock coat with wide lapels over a white shirt, the open collar giving the portrait an informal quality that contrasts with the evident distinction of the subject. The Warren's studio imprint appears in script on the front mount below the image.

The reverse bears the Warren's Portraits imprint at 465 Washington Street, Boston, in brown ink, a penciled notation reading Longfellow at the top, and a stain in the upper left corner from a previously attached label that has been removed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century, celebrated for The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, Paul Revere's Ride, and The Village Blacksmith. A professor of modern languages at Harvard for eighteen years, he was also the preeminent American translator of Dante's Divine Comedy. He was the first American to be honored with a bust in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, and his Cambridge home at Craigie House is preserved as a National Historic Site.

The reverse bears the Warren's Portraits imprint at 465 Washington Street, Boston, a penciled inscription reading Longfellow, and dealer code 10/27/13 / COLDXZ.