nerves shrank from all loud noises.

There is a tradition of his having begged a servant on a glorious Fourth of July to put cotton in his ears to deaden the roar of the cannon, and in later life one of his book-plates bore the motto Non Clamor, sed Amor."

At the age of fifteen this shy, studious lad was sent to Bowdoin College at Brunswick, Maine, after Portland Academy had taught him all it knew. He came prepared to make the most of his opportunities, and after four years of hard work graduated with distinction, and with the promise of a professorship after a year of travel had broadened his mental horizon.

The next summer found Longfellow at Paris with all Europe before him. He wandered through England, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Spain; everywhere studying the languages, and absorbing the rich associations of foreign places. His impressions of what he saw were in later years embodied in the prose works Outre-Mer and Hyperion. On his return he at once assumed the duties of his professorship, finding little time for literature. In 1831 he married an acquaintance of former years, Mary Storer Poller, with whom he lived most happily until her premature death in 1835. In 1834 a pleasant surprise came in the shape of an offer of the Chair of Modern Languages at Harvard, an offer which Longfellow was only too glad to accept. The new professor's official duties were light, and he had leisure for the literary pursuits which had ever been his delight. Hyperion, a romance in two volumes, and The Voices of the Night, a volume of poems containing "The Reaper and the Flowers," and "The Psalm of Life," were published in 1839. Two years later appeared Ballads and other Poems, containing the "Wreck of the Hesperus," "The Village Blacksmith," and "Excelsior"; and in the following year Poems on Slavery. This quiet life of work

Hia

was interrupted in 1842 by a visit to Dickens in London, but speedily resumed. In July, 1843, Longfellow married his second wife, a Miss Appleton, whose acquaintance he had made for the first time during his Swiss tour. Longfellow's ambition was to be the national poet of America,-an ambition to which he was spurred on by Margaret Fuller, probably the most intellectual woman of the time in America. She called his poems exotic flowers, with no smell of American soil about them. The outcome of this criticism was the writing of Evangeline, followed later by Hiawatha and Miles Standish, all refreshingly American in flavor. watha, a poem founded on Indian myths, is cast in the form of the Eddas, the ancient epics of Finland, a form with which Longfellow had become familiar in his studies of the Scandinavian languages. The Courtship of Miles Standish pictures the deeds and sufferings of the early Plymouth colony, a recital enlivened only by the description of the courting of Priscilla by proxy. It is not to be understood that Longfellow's fame rested on these American poems alone he had already written a quantity of poetry which had established his reputation as a poet, but it was on these that he based his claim to be considered the national poet of America.

In 1854, after about eighteen years of academic work, Longfellow felt warranted in resigning his Harvard professorship, to be free for purely literary pursuits. His home at Cambridge was the large Craigie House, which could boast of having once been the headquarters of Washington. Here, surrounded by a brilliant circle of friends, he lived in all the flush of a happy, successful life until 1861,-that fatal year, when his peace was invaded by a frightful calamity: Mrs. Longfellow, while playing with her children, set fire to her dress, and was mortally injured by the flames. The poet never recovered from the shock of this bereave

ment, although he continued his work with unabated vigor until the time of his death in March 1882.

After Tennyson, Longfellow has been the most popular poet of his day. Some critics have said that had Tennyson never written the Idylls, or In Memoriam, his inferiority to Longfellow would have been manifest, but the power displayed in these high realms of poetry was quite beyond Longfellow's reach. His range is domestic. He lacks the power of depicting deep passion, or of robing purely imaginative subjects with ideal grace and color. The forces necessary to the execution of an heroic poem are not his, but on the other hand, in such a description of quiet love and devoted patience as he gives us in Evangeline, Longfellow may be ranked with the greatest of poets.

CRITICAL OPINIONS.

The

CHILD of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of strength had come forth sweetness. grim iconoclast, "humming a surly hymn," had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in the most gracious and captivating form. . . . The foundations of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary Bohemia. The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of the last generation,Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley,-have been sober and industrious citizens, of whom Judge Sewall would have approved. Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have illustrated the moral sanity of genius.

Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of his verse which at once charms the heart; and in his first most famous poem, the "Psalm of Life," it is the direct inculcation of a moral purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the heart

of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love; Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of passion; Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend; and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the pathos and the beauty, of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the common scene,—these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the singer the most widely beloved of living men.-George William Curtis.

HE is in a high sense a literary man ; and next a literary artist; and thirdly, a literary artist in the domain of poetry. It would not be true to say that his art is of the intensest kind or most magical potency; but it is art, and imbues whatever he performs. In so far as a literary artist in poetry is a poet, Longfellow is a poet, and should (to the silencing of all debates and demurs) be freely confessed and handsomely installed as such. How far he is a poet in a further sense than this remains to be determined.

Having thus summarily considered "the actual quality of the work" as derived from the endowments of the worker, I next proceed to "the grounds upon which the vast popularity of the poems has rested." One main and in itself all-sufficient ground has just been stated: that the sort of intelligence of which Longfellow is so conspicuous an example includes pre-eminently "a great susceptibility to the spirit of the age." The man who meets the spirit of the age half-way will be met half-way by that; will be adopted as a favorite child, and warmly reposited in the heart. Such has been the case with Longfellow. In sentiment, in percep