"Poems of Places," a collection of what may be termed poetical topography, was brought out by Messrs. Osgood and Co., in 1876-79, nominally under the editorship of Longfellow. In 1878 he returned to a scene he loved when a boy, in "Kéramos," a poem of the potter. "Kéramos" had originally appeared in Harper's Magazine. In book form, it was accompanied by a last flight of "Birds of Passage," including "The Herons of Elmwood," "The White Czar,” and nineteen sonnets. The first Flight of "Birds" had appeared with "Miles Standish," and included "The Churchyard at Cambridge " and "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz." The second Flight appeared with "Tales of a Wayside Inn," and included "The Children's Hour" and "The Cumberland." The third Flight had appeared with the second series of "Tales," and included "Travels by the Fireside." The fourth Flight appeared with "The Masque of Pandora," and contained nothing noticeable; the fifth Flight was that mentioned as accompanying “Kéramos.” Among the nineteen sonnets printed with "Kéramos" were those on "The Three Silences" and "St. John's, Cambridge." In an earlier chapter of this little book it has been hinted that for the shell-bound harmonies of the sonnet-form, Longfellow did not exhibit perfect ear. Yet he is a far better sonnet-writer than Shelley, or Byron, or Tennyson; his sonnets on the "Divina Commedia" are structurally good, and fine in thought; and still nearer perfection is the thought of "Nature." Lastly came a thin book, made up of the best of the poet's later work. It bore a boding name, "Ultima Thule" (1880). In this book there were many farewells -the most touching being addressed to Bayard Taylor. The lines that give the volume its title may find a fit place on this page: ULTIMA THULE. TO GEORGE WASHINGTON GREENE. WITH favouring winds, o'er sunlit seas, How far since then the ocean streams Whither, ah, whither? Are not these Where seagulls scream, and breakers roar, Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle ! It is impossible to help wishing that "unending" here had been "unended." No one, surely, can read these sad lines from an old man who had enjoyed much in life, without being touched. In Harper's Magazine for March, 1882, the aged poet read an account of a ruined convent in Mexico, and by one passage about the convent bells was roused to write his last song-the song about "The Bells of San Blas." 170 LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. These lines conclude the poem, and ended his singing for ever: "Out of the shadow of night The world rolls into light; That was the last grand line of a whole-hearted poet, who had never lost faith in his God, and still hoped, like Goethe, for "more light!" On Friday, March 24, 1882, Henry Longfellow sank peacefully in death, aged seventy-five. Peritonitis had hastened the natural decay. Amid gently falling snow he was buried in the cemetery of Mount Auburn, near Cambridge. Longfellow to the end had held to the Unitarian faith in which he had been bred. After the poet's death, a few of his later verses were published under the title of "In the Harbour" (1882). His tragedy, called "Michel Angelo," ran through three numbers of The Atlantic Monthly for 1883. A CHAPTER XIII. MERICA'S chief poets-Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, Whittier, and Whitman-although writing in the youth of their country's literature, and almost contemporaneously, have differed from one another very widely in their aims and styles. When Bryant as a lad, first read Wordsworth's poems, he felt as if a thousand springs had gushed up in his heart. He was by nature a solidly intellectual being, rather than a dreamer. The vast horizons of American scenery, the "grey and melancholy waste" of ocean, the untenanted prairies, the primeval forests of pine, the unsung majesty of Western rivers whose floods mocked the stream of Nilus-these manifestations of mighty nature impressed his growing mind with an awe that only ceased to be dumb when Wordsworth's songs of beck and hill and dale revealed to him the power that might become his own-the power of teaching in melodious verse the joys of nature-worship. Expanding in the exercise of this priest-like task, his spirit laid itself bare to all the wonderful works of God that lay around him. Patient in observation as any man of science might be, casting about for the hidden teachings of creation, he became imbued with those deep, calm joys that only nature bestows; his studies became song, chant-like in character, though once or twice exultantly lyrical. With all his sense of beauty in the external world, Bryant is not possessed, so much as Wordsworth was, with potent hopes. His moods are chiefly sombre; he loves best to sing the sad glories of autumn with a dying fall. Emerson, too, was strongly influenced by New England scenery; but external nature was to him not so much an object of worship as a stimulus towards the purification of human character. Through all the scenes he depicts, his thoughts pass with a cold keenness like that of the early spring winds. Nothing, to him, is an endin-itself (as the German philosophers would say) except moralizing. The moral ultimatum of all being is his quest; he is Kant among the poets, considerably bewildered at times by his poetic fancies, and thereby rendered a less consistent preacher. Bryant and Emerson are both limited in their command over the musical resources of language. Bryant in his blank verse seldom failed to produce sonorous, organ-like tones; but in other metres he was not sure of his effect. Emerson clung to no special form of verse; metre was never attractive to him; a strong thought was sufficient at any time to serve him for an excuse to violate prosody; but in his more rhapsodical moments he has attained a clearer lyric cry, a more pathetically human voice, than Bryant ever reached. There are but two elements in the poetry of Emerson-first, the constant search after spiritual developments; and secondly, the study of the laws of so |