to give the address at the Harvard Commemoration for which Lowell's great Ode was written.

The last ten years of Emerson's life were somewhat clouded by a gradual failure of his mental powers, especially of the memory, but he was always, as Whitman has described him in his reminiscences, beautiful in old age. Holmes tells us of the last time he saw Emerson, at Longfellow's funeral, in 1882. Twice he rose, and looked intently on the face of the dead poet, and the last time turned and said to a friend near him, 'That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.' Emerson died just a month after Longfellow, April 24, 1882.

'I am born a poet,' wrote Emerson in 1835; of a low class, without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, to be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and true lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those.' At other times, Emerson said of himself, I am not a great poet.' On the other hand, Mr. Stedman calls him 'our most typical and inspiring poet.' It has often been said that he could not write poetry at all, and as often replied that he could write nothing else. Of course the question is largely one of definitions. Emerson's own dictum, The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce,' which has often been quoted in settlement of the question, is too vague to be of any real help. It would apply equally well as a standard for the judgment of great prose writers, or great orators. Confusion arises on the one hand from identifying poetry with whatever is noble and imaginative in thought or feeling, and on the other hand, from narrowing it to the mere singing faculty. The lyric is only one of the many poetic forms; and the lyric element in poetry is only one of its important elements. In the nineteenth century, to be sure, the lyric almost usurped to itself the whole domain and conception of poetry. But this error can be only a passing one. What lasts from century to century in poetry is even more often those words or phrases which condense thought or feeling or vision into simple and well-shaped rhythmic form, than the verse that merely appeals to the senses with easy-flowing or even haunting melody. We may even admit that Emerson was not a born singer, many of the greatest poets have not been, in the narrow lyric sense of the word, and still maintain, without falling into the opposite error of identifying poetry with that nobility of thought and originality of imagination which are merely possible material for poetry, that he was a born poet. For he proved himself a poet in the form as well as in the substance of his work. That he did not altogether lack the lyric note, the Earth Song' in Hamatreya,' a few passages in Woodnotes' and 'May Day,' and many stanzas of My Garden,' of Waldeinsamkeit,' and of the Concord Ode,' at once show. But, what is far more important, he has in a supreme degree the faculty of fitting thought to the form of verse rather than merely to its melody. Many a line, many a quatrain, many brief passages, and a few complete poems, stand, and are beginning more and more to stand out, in Emerson's work, like those lines of which Holmes said that a moment after they were written it seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years.'

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born at Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, the second of eight children. He came of an old New England family. His father and his great-grandfather were graduates of Harvard College. On his mother's side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth, and his maternal grandfather, General Peleg Wadsworth, was a distinguished officer in the Revolution. He spent a happy boyhood in Portland, the memory of which returns often in his poems, especially in My Lost Youth.' The first book that he remembered with delight was Irving's Sketch Book, which he read in numbers when it appeared. His first published verses, the Battle of Lovell's Pond,' were printed in the Portland Gazette when he was thirteen years old.

It might have been expected that he would go to Harvard College, as his father had

done. But his father was now a trustee of Bowdoin, the chief college of Maine, which had only recently been set apart from Massachusetts as a separate state. Longfellow entered the sophomore class at Bowdoin in 1822, and graduated in 1825, ranking second in his class. Hawthorne was in the same class; and Franklin Pierce, later President of the United States, and Hawthorne's close friend, was in the next preceding class.

In his last year at college, when the question of choosing a career in life became pressing, Longfellow wrote to his father (December 5, 1824): 'I take this early opportunity to write to you, because I wish to know fully your inclination with regard to the profes sion I am to pursue when I leave college. For my part, I have already hinted to you what would best please me. I want to spend one year at Cambridge for the purpose of reading history, and of becoming familiar with the best authors in polite literature; whilst at the same time I can be acquiring a knowledge of the Italian language, without an acquaintance with which I shall be shut out from one of the most beautiful departments of letters. The French I mean to understand pretty thoroughly before I leave college. After leaving Cambridge, I would attach myself to some literary periodical publication, by which I could maintain myself and still enjoy the advantages of reading. Now, I do not think that there is anything visionary or chimerical in my plan thus far. The fact is—and I will not disguise it in the least, for I think I ought not the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in it. There may be something visionary in this, but I flatter myself that I have prudence enough to keep my enthusiasm from defeating its object by too great haste. Surely, there never was a better opportunity offered for the exertion of literary talent in our own country than is now offered. To be sure, most of our literary men thus far have not been professedly so, until they have studied and entered the practice of Theology, Law, or Medicine. But this is evidently lost time. . . . Whether Nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing, that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief, I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of the law.'

On the last day of the year he wrote again: 'I am very desirous to hear your opinion of my project of residing a year at Cambridge. Even if it should be found necessary for me to study a profession, I should think a twelve-months' residence at Harvard before commencing the study would be exceedingly useful. Of divinity, medicine, and law, I should choose the last. Whatever I do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul, — for I will be eminent in something. The question then is, whether I could engage in the law with all that eagerness which in these times is necessary to success. I fear that I could not. . . . Let me then reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres; and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I could make in the literary world.' His father answered: A literary life, to one who has the means of support, must be very pleasant. But there is not enough wealth in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune (I will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation. I am happy to observe that my ambition has never been to accumu late wealth for my children, but to cultivate their minds in the best possible manner, and to imbue them with correct moral, political, and religious principles, - believing that a person thus educated will with proper diligence be certain of attaining all the wealth which is necessary to happiness. With regard to your spending a year at Cambridge, I have always thought it might be beneficial; and if my health should not be impaired and my finances should allow, I should be very happy to gratify you.' The letter goes on with a kindly criticism of some verses by Longfellow which had just been published. Longfellow regretfully accepted his father's decision, choosing, among the three possible professions, the law. I can be a lawyer,' he says. This will support my real existence, literature my ideal one.' Just at the right moment, however, there came an

apparent solution of the difficulty in the shape of an offer from the trustees of Bowdoin to establish for Longfellow a professorship of modern languages, on condition that he should spend some time in Europe preparing for the position. His father provided the necessary money for foreign travel and study. The season of the year was not favorable for sailing, so it was not until the following May (1826), that he began the long voyage from New York to Havre. Meanwhile he spent some time in reading law in his father's office, and more in writing verses, some of which were printed in the Atlantic Souvenir of Philadelphia, and others in the United States Literary Gazette of Boston, to which he had already contributed during his last year in college. A few of these pieces were preserved in the section entitled Earlier Poems' of Longfellow's first volume of original verse, published fourteen years later.

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On arriving in Europe, in June, 1826, he went first to Paris, and spent about eight months there; then to Spain (where he met Washington Irving), for nearly a year; then to Italy for almost another year (1828); and to Germany for his last six months, returning home in August, 1829. He had acquired a good practical knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian, but had found German more difficult, and made comparatively little progress in it.

Longfellow entered on his work as a teacher of modern languages and literatures in September, 1829. The idea that study of the modern languages could form any serious part of a college curriculum was at that time a new one. Only one important professorship in the subject existed. There were not even any elementary text-books for English speaking students, and Longfellow had to begin by making his own. He published a translation of L'Homond's French Grammar; an elementary reading book in French, called Manuel de Proverbes Dramatiques; and a similar book for Spanish; he wrote in French a syllabus of the elements of Italian grammar, and edited a collection of extracts from Italian writers, writing his preface in Italian. He attended carefully and thoroughly to his work, hearing recitations, composing and correcting exercises, etc., and found time to write, outside of his text-books, only a few articles for the North American Review, dealing in elementary fashion with the French, Italian, and Spanish languages and literatures. He found the profession which he had chosen no less exacting than the law would have been, and almost more so; since, by employing him on work closely similar in kind to that which he most desired to do, it left him little freshness of mind for original composition. His work was well and faithfully done, however; he had the respect and liking of his students; and in 1834 the most important position within the field of his chosen work was offered to him, the Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and of Belles Lettres,' at Harvard, previously held, since its foundation in 1816, by Ticknor. With the offer came a suggestion from the President of the University: Should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside in Europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months, for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the German, Mr. Ticknor will retain his office till your

return.'

Longfellow eagerly accepted this offer. He had been married in 1831 to Mary Potter of Portland, and they sailed for Europe in April, 1835. They went first to England, then to Holland, where Mrs. Longfellow fell ill, and died in November. Longfellow was more than most men one for whom it was 'not good that he should be alone.' The rest of his year in Europe was spent in the shadow of sorrow and loneliness. He studied faithfully, mastered the German language, and buried himself in the reading of the modern German romantic literature, the influence of which is so strong in his prose romance, Hyperion. This romance was in part inspired by Miss Frances Appleton, whom he met the following summer in Switzerland, and who appears in it as Mary Ashburton.

On his return to America in the autumn (1836), he entered on the duties of his professorship at Harvard. He had somewhat less of routine work to do than at Bowdoin, and more lecturing. He had one assistant for each of the foreign languages taught, but still retained personal oversight of the work of each student, and often was confined to his classroom

work for three whole days in each week. He now formed broader and richer friendships than he had known before, particularly with Charles Sumner, then teaching in the Harvard Law School, with C. C. Felton, professor of Greek, and later President, with George S. Hillard, and others; and renewed his college friendship with Hawthorne. He had grown with the experiences of life, and now found the mechanical duties which filled so much of his time more irksome than before. Perhaps the worst thing in college life,' he wrote in his Journal, is this having your mind constantly a playmate for boys, constantly adapting itself to them, instead of stretching out and grappling with men's minds; ' and again: Lecturing is all well enough, and in my history is an evident advance upon the past. But now one of my French teachers is gone, and this dragooning of schoolboys in lessons is like going backward.' On the whole, however, he believed in his work: 'Have I been wise to give up three whole days (in the week) to college classes? I think I have; for thus I make my presence felt here, and have no idle time to mope and grieve;' and again: After all Cambridge delighteth my heart exceedingly. I have fallen upon books with a most voracious appetite; .. no doubt, if I could bring myself to give up all my time to the college . . . I could get along very comfortably, but the idea of standing still or going backward is not to be entertained.' Constantly the memory of his early ambitions, and of how little he has done to achieve them, returns to him: 'I could live very happily here if I could chain myself down to college duties and be nothing but a professor. I should then have work enough, and recreation enough. But I am too restless for this. What should I be at fifty? A fat mill-horse, grinding round with blinkers on. This will not do. It is too much for one's daily bread when one can live on so little.' These extracts are from his Journal of 1838–39; and it is in these same years that he is writing the few brief and simple poems that are the real beginning of his poetical work the Psalm of Life,' the Light of Stars,' the Hymn to the Night," Footsteps of Angels,' and the Beleaguered City.' These five poems and four others almost equally well known, with seven Earlier Poems,' were collected and published in a slender volume called Voices of the Night, in 1839. Hyperion was published in the same year. Two years later he published another small collection entitled Ballads and Other Poems, containing the 'Skeleton in Armor,' the Wreck of the Hesperus,' the Village Blacksmith,' Endymion,' the Rainy Day,' 'Maidenhood,' and 'Excelsior.' In 1842 the Spanish Student' appeared, as a serial, in Graham's Magazine.

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Longfellow was now thirty-five years old. His health was somewhat impaired by his years of close work, and he found himself compelled to take a half-year's leave of absence, which he spent mostly at Marienberg, in Germany. Here began his lasting friendship with Freiligrath, who later translated 'Hiawatha.' On his way home he passed through England, met Landor and Dickens, read Dickens's American Notes, and was particularly impressed with the grand chapter on slavery,' as he calls it. During the return voyage, being confined to his cabin for about a fortnight, he wrote the seven brief Poems on Slavery. These, with one additional poem, were published in a little volume of thirty-one pages, in December, 1842, and were hailed with delight by the abolitionists, who felt that a very strong ally had joined their forces. Longfellow, however, declined to accept the congressional nomination which was offered him through Whittier by the Liberty party, or to take any further part in the anti-slavery contest. He even omitted the poems on slavery from the first collected edition of his poems, an act for which he has been severely blamed. Yet even Lowell, ardent abolitionist as he was at the time, and uncompromising as he was on the question of omitting any of his own anti-slavery poems, felt that Longfellow was justified in doing so, since he might well consider these poems to be the least valuable part of his work. It is probable, also, that the gentle Longfellow, who did not lack courage, but who did lack the fighting edge,' omitted the poems rather from a genuine desire to avoid wounding any of his readers than from mere policy. In any case, the poems are unimportant. I have attempted only to invest the subject with a poetic coloring,' wrote Longfellow to John Forster; and that is all he succeeded in doing; many will say, with a false poetic coloring. The Poems on Slavery have none of the deep

conviction and intensity of Whittier's or Lowell's, and are more closely related to German literary romanticism than to American social conditions.

Longfellow had not even yet found himself,' and had barely begun, in a few ballads, his real poetical work. He had written in his Journal in 1840, speaking of a visit to Mr. Norton: There I beheld what perfect happiness may exist on this earth, and felt how I stood alone in life, cut off for a while from those dearest sympathies for which I long.' It was at Marienberg that he wrote the sonnet Mezzo Cammin,' oppressed with a feeling that, though he was the author of a few brief and popular poems, yet he had spent half of man's allotted years without having begun that tower of song with lofty parapet,' which it had been his ambition to build. He was almost entirely dependent upon home life and home affection; and when he at last found these, in his marriage with Miss Frances Appleton, in 1843, his maturity and the creative period of his life really began. He finished his work as a mere editor and compiler (except for the Poems of Places, much later) with the Poets and Poetry of Europe, in 1845. At the end of that year was published the Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, dated 1846, which closes the first period of his work, and already shows a great advance in artistic quality over the crude moralizing and vaguely romantic commonplace of his earliest work. The first collected edition of his poems had been published in a sumptuous volume by Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, in 1845, and Evangeline' was just begun.

The characteristics of all Longfellow's work, which are especially marked in its first period, are not such as appeal either to the intellectual critic or to the lover of art for art's sake. A good deal of its romantic imagery strikes us now as false, and its simplicity as bathos. Excelsior' is a truly imaginative conception, but in expression it degenerates into A tear stood in his bright blue eye. But still he answered with a sigh,' etc. The expression is truly imaginative in that French passage from which he took the idea of the 'Old Clock on the Stairs,' yet Longfellow makes of it such lines as 'Some are married, some are dead,' which is almost as bad as the line that Tennyson declared to be typical Wordsworthian blank verse, 'A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.' But it is the very triumph of these early poems that most of their lines seem more commonplace than they really are, because they have become, by their simplicity and genuineness, a part of the universal feeling of the race. Simple and genuine they are, except for the false romantic imagery already spoken of, such as is found in the Reaper and the Flowers.' Their appeal is universal; and to each individual it may at some time be new, as it was to all the young America of 1840. Even in our sophisticated times, it would be a pretty poor sort of youth who would not still be thrilled at his first reading of the Psalm of Life.' 'The Day is Done,' hackneyed as it is, is still full of simple and restful beauty.

On the last day of 1845, Longfellow wrote in his Journal: Peace to the embers of burnt-out things; fears, anxieties, doubts, all gone! I see them now as a thin blue smoke, hanging in the bright heaven of the past year, vanishing away into utter nothingness. Not many hopes deceived, not many illusions scattered, not many anticipations disappointed; but love fulfilled, the heart comforted, the soul enriched with affection!' The first period of his life and writing was in fact finished, and his next fifteen years were to contain the largest and the most important part of his poetical work. In the earlier period he had been growing, experimenting, preluding; in the third and last period, which was to follow 1861, he touched deeper notes sometimes, and attained to greater artistic beauty and condensation; but he produced no such large body of lasting work as in the middle period.

This middle period, from the end of 1845 to the beginning of 1861, contains 'Evangeline' (1847); Hiawatha' (1855); the Courtship of Miles Standish' (1858); the 'Building of the Ship,' and other poems, especially of the home, in The Seaside and the Fireside (dated 1850, published 1849); the Golden Legend (1851); the Saga of King Olaf' and others of the best Tales of a Wayside Inn, not published until later; My Lost Youth;' the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz;' and some of Longfellow's most beautiful poems of childhood, including Children,' and 'The Children's Hour.' Longfellow's own home was made complete in these years by the coming of his five children, three girls and two boys,

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