Much of

his Poetry suggested by his

Reading.

Popular

ity.

chiefly, if not wholly, by noble and beautiful records of facts long since dead and gone. Whoever will take the trouble to look through an index of the titles of Longfel low's poems will at once be struck by the number of subjects suggested by foreign travel or by reading in foreign literature. Among these are most of the Tales of a Wayside Inn (1849-1873), the greater part of Christus (1849– 1872), which Longfellow considered one of his most important poems; the translation of Dante's Divina Commedia (1867) and many shorter translations from French, German, Spanish, Italian, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other sources; the romances Outre-Mer (1835), Hyperion (1839), and Kavanagh (1849); and many short poems of various degrees of originality.

Though this limitation marks Longfellow apart from those great poets who have immortally expressed the meaning of actual life, it had at once the grace of sincerity, and the added grace of that natural gift which was perhaps Longfellow's most salient. His taste was unerring. Wherever he met the beauties of literature he delighted in them instinctively; and in his instinctive feelings about literature there was something very like the confidence in human nature which inspired the world in which he lived. To him literature was a region of delight so fresh that he could rejoice in its beauties, which he perceived with such instant tact, and could honestly be blind to everything not beautiful or noble.

The impression which he made on his first readers has never been better phrased than by Mr. Stedman—

"A new generation may be at a loss to conceive the effect of Longfellow's work when it first began to appear. I may convey something of this by what is at once a memory and an illustration. Take the

case of a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a decaying Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of the old Congregational type. The interior-plain, colorless, rigid with dull white pews and dismal galleries—increased the spiritual starvation of a young nature unconsciously longing for color and variety. Many a child like this one, on a first holiday visit to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, the roofs and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a sense of something rich and strange; and many, now no longer children, can remember that the impression upon entrance was such as the stateliest cathedral now could not renew. The columns and tinted walls, the ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of gules and azure and goldthe service, moreover, with its chant and organ-roll-all this enraptured and possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded them, that of nature's picturesqueness-which even Calvinism endured without compunction—was added a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty and sanctity of human art. A similar delight awaited the first readers of Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and a romancer indeed, who had journeyed far and returned with gifts for all at home, and who promised often and again to

'sing a more wonderful song

Or tell a more marvellous tale.""

The hold which Longfellow thus took on enthusiastic American youth he soon took on the whole reading public of our country. His popularity is evident in our general familiarity with the creatures of his fancy. The village blacksmith, the youth who bears 'mid snow and ice a banner with the strange device Excelsior, the skipper wrecked on the reef of Norman's Woe, Evangeline, Hiawatha, Miles Standish, John Alden, Priscilla the Puritan maiden, and even Paul Revere-figures and names which we owe almost wholly to Longfellow-he has made us apt to Limitagroup with Bible patriarchs or the world-old heroes of antiquity. Such popularity almost implies a weakness. Profundity of substance, or excellence of form, rarely

tions.

touches the masses; and Longfellow's very popularity resulted long ago in a reaction against him among the fastidious. Even in early days, too, when his popularity was in its first flush, the admiration which his work excited was clouded by occasional dissent. Margaret Fuller, for

example, conscientiously devoted to the extravagance of Transcendental philosophy, found Longfellow shallow, and said so. Poe utterly misunderstood the academic character of Longfellow's mind, and accused him of plagiarism. And there was more such criticism.

Again, Longfellow, a lifelong friend of Charles Sumner, always sympathized with the antislavery movement; and in 1842 he published some poems in its behalf. These poems are perfectly sincere; but one needs only to com

pare them with the similar work of Whittier to feel more strongly than ever Longfellow's lack of passion.

and

low's chief

Qualities.

But this is more than enough of his faults and limita- Simplicity tions. He has passed from us too lately to permit us Beauty to dwell upon the singular serenity and beauty of his Longfelpersonal life and character. No one can read its records or remember anything of its facts without feeling the rare quality of a nature which throughout a lifetime could persist unspoiled by prosperity and unbroken by poignant personal sorrows. To be sure, he was never passionate; neither in his life nor in his verse does he ever seem to have been swept away by feeling. On the other hand, as we have seen, his taste was unerring, and his sentiment gently sympathetic. His real office was to explore and to make known that modern literature in whose beauty he delighted. And if the verse in which he set forth his delight be hardly of the kind which enriches world-literature, its lucidity of phrase and its delicacy of rhythm combine to give it a sentimental beauty which must long endear it to those who love simplicity of heart.

Thereby, after all, Longfellow comes very near a worldold definition of literary greatness, which has sometimes been held the virtue of those who think the thoughts of the Summary. wise and who speak the language of the simple. It may be that he knew few wise thoughts which were all his own; but he so truly loved the wisdom and the beauty of those elder literatures which he was the first of Americans fully to recognize, that he absorbed in a way of his own the wisdom which the good and the great of the past had gleaned from experience. At first, to be sure, it may seem that those considerable parts of his work which deal with our native country are of another stripe. More and more,

however, one grows to feel that, despite the subjects, these are not indigenous in sentiment. Rather, for the first time, they illuminate our American past with a glow of conventional romance. So by and by we find that our gently academic poet has just been thinking about New England in such moods as he loved in countless old-world poets who early and late recorded the historic romance of Europe. Yet Longfellow does not seem to have been consciously imitative. He sincerely believed that he was making spontaneous American poetry. Whatever his lack of passion or imagination, he was never false to himself. Whether he ever understood his mission it is hard to say; but what that mission was is clear; and so is the truth that he was a faithful missionary. Never relaxing his effort to express in beautiful language meanings which he truly believed beautiful, he revealed to the untutored new world the romantic beauty of the old. And suffusing even our simple native traditions with a glow of romance,

"He left his native air the sweeter for his song."