think I should be more satisfied if I did the work all myself. Nevertheless, I take things very easily, not expecting perfection, and making the best of all things.' That was his way: to take things easily, and make the best of all things. He did not ignore the active life outside his own little world. He did not, as some men of letters have done, profess to despise it. It would be unfair to him to say he had no sympathy with it. Sympathy he had for everything and everybody. His study-door stood, in his biographer's expressive phrase, always open; and within beat always an open heart. The affection he seems to have inspired in all who knew him, here as well as in his own country, is rare indeed in the history of letters; one hardly knows, perhaps, where to match it, save in the life of Walter Scott. It is beautifully and fitly expressed in the lines Mr. Lowell (his successor at Harvard) wrote for his sixtieth birthday "With loving breath of all the winds, his name Is blown about the world; but to his friends A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, And Love steals shyly through the loud acclaim To murmur a God bless you! and there ends." The man to whom such praise could be given can never have been or seemed cold, or careless, or unsympathetic. His own work is proof enough to the contrary. Its chiefest charm lies in the sweet and liberal charity it breathes for all sorts and conditions of men. One might apply to him, though in a different sense, the lines of Coleridge: "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, And feed his sacred flame." Whatever stirred the life around him, but outside his own, served to feed the gentle flame of his universal charity and good-will. Yet though he looked on all things with a kindly eye, he looked on them with an incurious one. No. 319.-VOL. LIV. He sympathised with Sumner's poli tical struggles, because Sumner was his friend; but he regretted them. "Nothing but politics now," he writes in 1848. "Oh, where are those genial days when literature was the theme of our conversation?" Eleven years later, on December 2nd, 1859, a memorable day in the annals of America, his journal shows this note: “ This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution-quite as much needed as the old one. Even now, as I write, they are leading old. John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon." Then follow at intervals such passages as these:-" Read the newspapers. good cheer there. through the land. No Rebellion stalks South Carolina She talks nothing but fire and fury. says she will secede this time. Better this than have the North yield, which I am always a little afraid of. I hope we shall stand firm, and so end the matter once for all." .... "News comes that Fort Sumter is attacked. And so the war begins! Who can foresee the end?" .. "We are in the beginning of a civil war. A very bitter thought! Dined with Judge Phillips to meet Bryant." There is something almost abnormal, though we certainly would not say displeasing, in the spectacle of a man thus serenely pursuing his even life in the midst of such tremendous scenes. "With me," he said, "all deep feelings are silent ones.' But it is hard to conceive any of his feelings as very deep. His affection for his family and friends was very pure and sweet and genuine; but great depth of feeling is rarely found in natures of his mould. An ideal temperament for the man of letters was Longfellow's-if perhaps something less so for the poetand an ideal life. It was uneventful enough in the common sense. There were his two periods of travel in Europe; the first taken to prepare D himself for the chair at Bowdoin College, the second, five years later, to ground himself more thoroughly in the German and other northern languages. In the first he saw France, Spain, Italy, and Germany; and if he never attained to the extraordinary mastery over tongues claimed for Sir William Jones, at least he became a very tolerable proficient in the languages and literatures of those countries. In the second he paid a short visit to England, studied for some months at Stockholm and Copenhagen, passed the winter and spring in Heidelberg, saw Switzerland and the Tyrol, and so home again. His letters during this first period fill nearly a hundred pages of the first volume. Very interesting they must have been to the home circle, but perhaps a little less so now to the general reader. Full of good temper they are, and a wish to be pleased with everything and everybody. But they are curiously impersonal. One takes from them so little idea either of the young traveller, or of the countries and people seen. The chief impression we, for our part, have got from them is a pleasant little sketch of Washington Irving working at his 'Life of Columbus' in the early summer mornings at Madrid-and that was drawn many years after from memory! This, and the poetical gondolier at Venice who had served Byron, and remembered him as "a little pale man, but full of vivacity and talent," are the only impressions that have stayed with us from this part of the book. Perhaps it was with this time, too, as his biographer says it was with the later time, he put the best of himself into his books; and the best of his travels is to be got from the pages of 'Hyperion' and Outre-Mer,' the former of which must always keep its place. among autobiographies, as well for its graceful, tender personality, as for its rcmantic and literary charm. Thirty years later he was in England once more, and, with several members of his family, retracing the track of his early wanderings. It was during his second visit to Germany that his first wife died; five and twenty years later a yet more tragic fate deprived him of his second wife. She died from injuries. received by her dress catching fire, while she was sealing up, with her two little girls, some small packages of their curls which she had just cut off. But, save for these two sorrows, and the loss of a little daughter, the seventy-five years of his life were singularly serene and happy ones; his college duties, his books-those he read and those he wrote-and his friends made up the sum of his tran quil and blameless existence. The student in 'The Tales of a Wayside Inn' might stand well for the author's own portrait, though it was, we are told, designed for one of his friends Mr. Henry Ware Wales : A youth was there of quiet ways, We question whether the tale of such a man's life was to be best told as Mr. Longfellow has thought. He was hardly the man to be his own biographer. One of that group of friends, of whom only such meagre and tantalising glimpses are vouchsafed us in these journals, would have drawn, we suspect, a better portrait. One there was-is, we can happily say who would have drawn it well; one whom all English men of letters are even now preparing to welcome once more among them. What a picture might not Mr. Lowell have given us of his friend! For he could have said, in the beautiful words in which Callimachus mourned for the dead Heraclitus, What pictures, too, could he not have given us of the men who went in those years to Craigie House, that pleasant home, so rich in memories of Washington and "the brave days of old," so rich now in memories of a gentler time and fame. Pictures of Emerson and Hawthorne, of Charles Sumner and Prescott and Motley, of Agassiz and Felton, "heartiest of Greek Professors," as Charles Dickens used to call him; and of the Englishmen who came there to visit one whom England loved not less than America, of Dickens himself, and Thackeray, and Clough. What stories might he not have told of the suppers given in their honour, noctes cœnæque deum; of the famous dinners of the Saturday Club; and that earlier society, which called itself "The Five of Clubs," but by some wicked wags who were beyond the pale was called "The Mutual Admiration Society." Had Mr. Lowell done for Longfellow, what Dr. Holmes has done for Emerson, what a book we might have had ! An ideal life, we have said, an ideal temperament, for the man of letters; but perhaps something less so for the poet. "Visions of childhood! stay, oh stay! Ye were so sweet and wild! "The land of Song within thee lies, Its clouds are angels' wings. "Learn, that henceforth thy song shall be, "There is a forest where the din Sees the heavens all black with sin,- So he wrote in this thirty-second year, by way of prelude to his first volume of poems, 'Voices of the Night.' And he did look into his own heart, and wrote what he found there. But he found there soft rays of sunshine, and holy thoughts like stars, rather than withered leaves, and heavens black with sin; the forms that came to him were those of delight rather than sorrow; the voices he heard had more power to soothe than affright. Such sorrow as his verse expresses is of that kind that softens and refines the heart, not wrings or crushes it. No one, indeed, could better describe the charm of his verse than he himself has. "Come read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, "Not from the grand old masters, "For, like strains of martial music, "Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer As tears from the eyelids start; "Who, through long days of labour, "Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer." It is this tender restful charm which gave Longfellow his great, his universal popularity, a popularity which only Lord Tennyson has matched since Byron died. And it will always insure him a certain vogue among the young, and, with a particular order of minds, not only among the young. In the highest moment of his fame we should doubt if it ever occurred to any one to call him a great poet, even among his own countrymen, anxious as they were for one. That he assuredly was not. It is unnecessary to compare him with Poe, if for no other reason than this, that Poe's volume of verse is so scanty, and much of it such mere verbiage. But assuredly Longfellow at his very best. never reached such a height as Poe for one moment stood on when he conceived the lines beginning, "Helen, thy beauty is to me." Sometimes, but rarely, he strikes a note that suggests something beyond the words, as in the close of this stanza from the poem called My Lost Youth':: "In broad daylight, and at noon, "In broad daylight, yesterday, "But at length the feverish day "Then the moon, in all her pride, Like a spirit glorified, Filled and overflowed the night "And the Poet's song again Passed like music through my brain; And again in that passage where Evangeline wanders out into the night from the new home of Basil the blacksmith, on the banks of the Têche, crying on her lover who seemed still to fly her as she followed:"Loud and sudden and near the note of a whippoorwill sounded, Like a flute in the woods; and anon, through the neighbouring thickets, Farther and farther away it floated and dropped into silence. 'Patience!' whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness; And from the moonlit meadow, a sigh responded, "To-morrow!'" And the closing lines of the poem, where the lovers come together at last, will always keep their place among the favourite and familiar passages of English verse for the infinite pity of the scene, and the tender, melancholy grace of the words. And passages touched with those qualities are frequent enough in his work. Pity he could command; but the other passions he could not touch. His style is generally very level; he rarely either rises or sinks. He never reaches, nor tries to reach, the grand manner: that was not at all his way: but he never, or hardly ever, falls into mere baldness or verbiage. And he sometimes has singular felicities both of thought and expression: as in this stanza from 'The Discoverer of the North Cape':— "Hearty and hale was Othere, His cheek had the colour of oak; As unto the King he spoke." "Sings the blackened log a tune From a schoolboy at his play, When this has been said, and the almost unvarying ease, fluidity, and sweetness of his lines acknowledged -for there is never any sense of strain or effort in his verse; so far as it goes it may, indeed, be styled inevitable enough-when all this has been granted, it seems to us that the sum of Longfellow's poetic gifts has been told. His translations, indeed, will always count to his credit, for the dexterity and truth which all who know have allowed to them. And, of course, had it not been for his sense and faculty of poetry he could not have done what he did that way. But they cannot be justly brought into the balance with his creative work. After all, his real title to fame as an American poet rests on Hiawatha.' It is a national poem, just as Cooper's Indian novels, The Last of the Mohicans' and the rest of that series, are national novels. Evangeline' and 'Miles Standish' have both something of the same merit; but in spite of the national setting and colour the sentiment of both poems is really, as one may say, universal. The lovers might have been parted, to be "joined at evening of their days again"; John Alden might have played his friend unwittingly false, in any country in the world. And then the slovenliness of so much of the verse, and a certain flatness and triviality of execution make Evange line,' at any rate, sometimes very hard to read, for all the charm and pity of its design. But in Hiawatha' Longfellow has really broken new ground; and he moves along it with the bold firm step of a master of the soil. It is a real epic, the Indian Edda, as Emerson called it, adding that it was "sweet and wholesome as maize." It is that, and more than that; it has a strength, a movement and vitality, a breath of open air and broad sunlight about it, which are not general elements of Longfellow's writings. And it has his own charm too, the charm of simplicity, grace, tenderness. He has so admirably described its characteristics in the pre lude that we may, perhaps, be pardoned for a rather long quotation :— "Ye who love the haunts of Nature, Ye who love a nation's legends, "Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, There are longings, yearnings, strivings, Though we think the plan of Mr. Longfellow's book a mistaken one, yet we may own to have read it with great interest and pleasure. It has been inexpressibly refreshing in in these bustling, angry, many-sided times to read the story of this simple tranquil life, devoted to one aim, one business, one desire; of this good, sincere, gentle soul, who, as he was unstirred by any high imaginings, so was unvexed by |