second reading, and even Irving could not pretend to be a writer adequately representative of his race and times. No wonder, then, that Henry Longfellow, in the year that completed the first quarter of the nineteenth century, felt that there was room for an ambitious American man of letters. Many young fellows were just then thinking the same thing, and biding their chance. James Fenimore Cooper, it is true, had brought out his "Spy" in 1821; but Poe had not yet published a single poem ; Motley was a schoolboy at Dorchester; Prescott was unknown; Whittier was working on his father's farm, and had got no further in literature than the corner of a newspaper; Emerson was a fledgeling parson; Holmes was entering Harvard; Hawthorne's cloudy genius had not yet caught the sun. sun. Already the Bowdoin student of Horace had begun to formulate the canons of taste by which an aspirant for the place of an American poet of the age should guide himself. He felt that songs in the best English style about skylarks, and other objects unknown to natives in his country, would never do. And probably he was already equally sure that, as Niebuhr once said, "Not to know what men did before you were born, is to be always a child." Long afterwards, at any rate, he thus expressed his theory to Walt Whitman : "Ere the New World can be worthily original, and announce herself and her own heroes, she must be well saturated with the originality of others, and respectfully consider the heroes that lived before Agamemnon." To steep himself in the culture of Europe he went forth from his own vast and lovely land, the noblest loan that it had yet made to the elder 44 LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. nations, for he was a type of America's best-educated youth, and he was chivalrous and pure, and he carried with him, modestly and almost unconsciously, the impressionable mind of a true poet. He was to return and lift up a clear voice in song, as Schiller lifted up his voice after his country had lain for scores of years ungladdened by the melodies of any national singer; he was to be the first to bring the scholarship of Europe to the New World and make it live there, as Petrarch had centuries before rescued and revived for Europe itself the treasures of the Classic tongues; with his commingled learning, gentle charity, joy in life, and zeal for the beautiful, he was to become the father of America's humanisti. W CHAPTER IV. HEN Longfellow arrived in France, after a pleasant thirty days' sail from New York, he began to stare about him and laugh at everything, a perfect boy. In the streets of the Normandy towns he shouted with glee as he met the fierce gendarmerie with their great curling beards, and girls with wooden shoes "full of feet and straw," men in paper hats and tight pantaloons, and the market dames in tall pyramidal caps of muslin two feet high. Such sights as these fill his early home letters. Then in Paris, after eulogizing the boarding-house of Madame Potet at No. 49, Rue Monsieur le Prince, he begins to show signs of nostalgia, as every good lad should, when first away from his family. Madame Potet's kindness, too, is found to be as evanescent as it is effervescing, and in her house are too many Americans and other English-speaking boarders; so he makes a curious change, and establishes himself in a maison de santé at Auteuil, where he endeavours to pick up the French tongue from a houseful of hypochondriacs, and consequently writes to his father, "I had no idea of the difficulties attending my situation, no idea that it was indeed so difficult to learn a language." From Auteuil he goes off for a re-inspiriting pedestrian expedition along the banks of the Cher and the romantic Loire; and then he settles down again in the metropolis, en garçon, at Rue Racine, No. 5, picking up the language along with his meals, at crowded restaurants. The letters in which he describes his Paris life are really very dull affairs, and it is quite apparent from them that the poor lad was oppressed by conscientious desires to live on six francs a day and do his duty by foreign tongues. Italian lessons he added to his studies in French. The hubblebubble of Parisian life took his breath away at first, and he scarcely recovered it during his stay. Once he called to see Jules Janin, bearing an introduction, and climbing up five flights of stairs in the Quartier Latin to reach the critic, who was found seated at his writing-table in the centre of a study, or salon, or what you will-he had but one reception room. The little Frenchman started up with such hospitable effusion that the fresh ink spurted from his pen into the visitor's face. He called out loudly for some one. A young lady entered, and was introduced-Madame Janin. And now that Madame was come, Monsieur Janin said they would have dinner forthwith. Where? The host with the zest of a hungry man of letters getting rid of his toil, swept everything off his writing-table into a corner of the room; instanter a little maid-servant entered with cloth and soup-tureen, and the banquet commenced. How gay was the critic! and how Madame laughed! and how the guest blushed sometimes! The laughter lasted, and the blushes came and went,till dessert was placed on the table, and then Janin deviated into sense, and not only discussed literary affairs in a way that delighted the student, but gave him some useful hints about making the most of his sojourn in the city. The chat lasted till the lamps were lighted in the streets, when Janin took his new acquaintance for a walk along the quais, and the pair spent three charming hours by the Seine. The sentimental biographer might make a fine thing out of this tableau-the moon (for there was moonlight) silvering the pavement under the feet of these two notable human creatures, one in all the maturity of the small-raced Parisian-industrious, witty, versatile, unscrupulous, pleasure-loving, dissolute, a man who would make himself remarkable in any circumstances for talent and insouciance; the other taller and rather gaunt, grave in his very smiles, still seeming to have in his ears a dim resonance of preachers' voices in New England meeting-houses-frank in his glances, and hopeful in his talk, religiously possessed, above all, with the need to live simply and think much. After the manner of good Saxon-blooded youths, he astonished such as Jules Janin by his ignorance regarding many social problems. Yet, phlegmatic as he then seems to have been (how we do long for some moving sigh of ambition or love in this stalwart New Englander!), Longfellow's was the pure mind that would look back on its history as Wordsworth looked back on his own : "Not in vain By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn |