"As the grape comes to the vine, As the wind comes to the pine, "As come the white sails of ships "So come to the Poet his songs, From the misty realm, that belongs "His, and not his, are the lays Is his, and not his; and the praise "For voices pursue him by day And haunt him by night, And he listens and needs must obey, When the Angel says: 'Write!'' Few men ever phrased more sweetly what seemed to them the deepest facts of their artistic lives. In the gentleness of this phrasing, as well as in the triteness of this imagery, there is something which tells at once of Longfellow's limitations. and of his power. Thinking the thoughts of the wise, without suspicion that the wisdom was not always quite his own; speaking the language of the simple, with no consciousness of the commonplaces which lurk so near simplicity, — he believed till the end that to him the Angel had said “Write!” To him this injunction seemed as divine as any that Muse ever spoke to singer of pristine Greece, or that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit ever breathed into the heart of Hebrev prophet. The man would be bold who should reflectively say to-day that this pure, true life and work, lived and done by the most popular poet of our Renaissance, is not, after all, as admirable as many which our later moods of criticism have been apt to think greater. XII JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN 1854 Longfellow resigned the Smith professorship at Harvard College. The next year James Russell Lowell was appointed his successor. Up to this time Lowell's career, though more limited than Longfellow's, had been similar. Sprung from a family already distinguished, which throughout the nineteenth century has displayed high quality both in private and in civic life, he was born at Cambridge in 1819, the son of a Unitarian minister, whose church was in Boston. He grew up in Cambridge. In 1838 he took his degree at Harvard; he studied law; but he found this profession distasteful, and his true interest was in letters. For fifteen years before his appointment to the Smith professorship, then, he had been professionally a literary man. From this time on, for a full twenty-two years, his ostensible profession became what Longfellow's had been from 1836 to 1854, and Ticknor's from 1817 to 1835,-the teaching of modern languages and literature to Harvard undergraduates. The different tasks to which the successive Smith professors addressed themselves might once have seemed a question of different personalities; to-day, however, they seem rather a question of developing American culture. When Ticknor's work began, the names of Dante and Cervantes were hardly more familiar in America than that of the Japanese painter Hokusai is to-day. Ticknor's business, then, was to introduce to New England a fresh range of learning; and accordingly his most characteristic publication was the comprehensive, accurately unimaginative "History of Spanish Literature." When, after twenty years, Longfellow succeeded him, Amer In brief, this was ica knew modern literature by name, but, except perhaps for Bryant's translations, hardly more. Could anything have alleviated the drudgery of teaching, then, for a temperament always yearning to create, it would have been such a task as thus became Longfellow's. to make pupils enjoy excursions into that limitless world of modern literature which for America was still newly discovered. In 1855, when Lowell came to his work, the conditions had altered again. The main facts of modern literature had become almost classically familiar; and the influences which had expressed themselves in the various phases of New England Renaissance had greatly stimulated excellent general reading. To the generation with which Lowell came to his maturity, then, the great modern masters - Spenser and Shakspere, Dante and Cervantes and Goethe-were as freshly delightful as the old Greeks had been to the culture of fifteenth-century Italy. They were not yet stale. But scholarship cannot stagnate; modern literature had been discovered, it had been enthusiastically explored, and now came the task of understanding it. So as a college teacher, and as a critical writer too, Lowell's professional task proved interpretative. The way in which he addressed himself to this task, and the ends he accomplished, were humorously illustrated not long ago when two Harvard men chanced to meet, who had been pupils of Lowell twenty-five years before. One happened to have in his hand a copy of the "Song of Roland." His friend, glancing at it, was reminded of the old times and said rather enthusiastically: "How Lowell used to give us the spirit of that!"-"Yes," replied the other, who is an eminent philologist, "and that was all he gave us." In which emphatic little adjective is implied the phase which the study of modern literature has now assumed. This range of human expression has been discovered, it has been enjoyed, an attempt has been made to understand its spirit, and now, if we are to keep pace with scholarship, we must pitilessly analyse its every detail. Yet, though Lowell was not a severe modern scholar, he by no means neglected severe learning. A pupil who inquired about the minute works which were already beginning to interpose themselves between modern literature and human beings, was apt to find that Lowell had glanced through them and knew something of their merits. His sentiments about them, however, resembled Emerson's about the Lord's Supper; on the whole they did not interest him; and he always held that until you were interested in literature, you could not understand it. The task he set himself as a teacher, then, was to excite in his pupils intelligent interest in the texts with which he was dealing. This task he found as irksome as Ticknor or Longfellow had found theirs. In Lowell's teaching days the Renaissance of New England was beginning to fade; undergraduates were less and less apt to delight in poetry; and the very traits which prevented Lowell from generally appealing to the reading public prevented him too from generally appealing to Harvard students. On pupils whom he really touched, all the while, his influence was probably as strong as any exerted by a Harvard teacher of his time. How conscientiously he did his task will be clear to any Harvard man whose memory runs back five and twenty years. In 1875 Longfellow and Lowell were both living in Cambridge; and though Longfellow was growing old, both men seemed still in their prime. To Harvard students, then, both names were generally familiar. Longfellow they knew to be the most popular poet in America, so popular indeed that clever undergraduates, despising Philistine favourites, inclined to dismiss him as commonplace. Yet even these complacent critics could not be insensible to the singular beauty and dignity of Longfellow's presence, then daily familiar in Cambridge streets; and some of them were dimly aware that in a remote past this Olympian old man of letters had for a while been a Harvard professor. cisely the reverse. With Lowell the case was almost pre His figure was less often visible; hundreds of men went through college without knowing him by sight, but almost everybody knew that he was regularly teaching French and Italian and Spanish. They knew tor that this not very popular college teacher had literary reputation. They had heard of the "Vision of Sir Launfal " and the "Biglow Papers." These, however, belonged to a past as remote as Longfellow's professorship; and what Lowell had written since, they did not trouble themselves to inquire. To them Longfellow was a poet who had once been a professor; Lowell was a professor who had once written poetry. The eminence which finally made him a national worthy came from the social accomplishment with which from 1877 to 1885 he filled the office of United States minister, first to Spain and later to England. This fact that Lowell's eminence came late in life is characteristic. Throughout his career, as man of letters and as teacher alike, he had been at once helped and hindered by peculiarities of temperament conquerable only by the full experience of a slow maturity. Born and brought up in Cambridge, when Cambridge was still a Middlesex village, he was familiar with the now vanished country folk of old New England. From youth he was passionately fond of general reading, in days when this led no Yankee away from sound literature. Though impatient of minute scholarship, too, he possessed one of the most important traits of a minute scholar : by nature he was aware of detail in every impression, and careful of it in every expression. What truly interested him, to be sure, in life and in books alike, were the traits which make books and life most broadly human; nor did any one ever feel more deeply that, for all its paradoxical incongruities, humanity is finally a unit. In his effort to understand humanity, however, he was incessantly hampered by his constitutional sense of detail. The data of life, for one thing, |