The Dolliver Romance, 1876; Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, 1883. "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," by Julian Hawthorne contains all the essential biographical matter. A good literary biography is "A Study of Hawthorne" by G. P. Lathrop. The "Life" by Henry James, in English Men of Letters, is a very distinguished piece of work by one of the best critical minds of our time. The "Life" by G. E. Woodberry in American Men of Letters is excellent. CHAPTER VI LONGFELLOW ON THE death of Longfellow, Whitman wrote a tribute to the other "good gray poet," which is so just and beautiful that it should be known to all who are interested in either Longfellow or Whitman. "Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present age (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody), but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for the present age in America an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician and the day workman - for whom and among whom he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference — poet of the mellow twilight of the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and in northern Europe-poet of all sympathetic gentleness — and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were asked to name the man who has done more, and in more valuable directions, for America. "I doubt if there ever was such a fine intuitive judge and selecter of poems. His translations of many German and Scandinavian pieces are said to be better than the vernaculars. He does not urge or lash. HiinЯuence is like good drink or air. He is not tepid either, but always vital, with flavour, motion, grace. He strikes a splendid average, and does not sing exceptional passions, or humanity's jagged escapades. He is not revolutionary, brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows. On the contrary, his songs soothe and heal, or if they excite, it is a healthy and agreeable excitement. His very anger is gentle, is at second hand (as in the 'Quadroon Girl' and the 'Witnesses'). "There is no undue element of pensiveness in Longfellow's strains. Even in the early translation, the Manrique, the movement is as of strong and steady wind or tide, holding up and buoying. Death is not avoided through his many themes, but there is something almost winning in his original verses and renderings on that dread subject—as, closing the 'Happiest Land' dispute And then the landlord's daughter "To the ungracious complaint-charge of his want of racy nativity and special originality, I shall only say that America and the world may well be reverently thankfulcan never be thankful enough-for any such singing-bird vouchsafed out of the centuries, without asking that the notes be different from those of other songsters; adding what I have heard Longfellow himself say, that 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." Longfellow is the household poet of America; the laureateship was conferred on him by popular response, immediate, spontaneous and continuous. When that is said, whatever may be added is less significant. It is a noble fate to be for many years the poet most cherished by a million hearths. The multitudinous electorate may not crown the highest poetry, but whatever it does choose and long adhere to is indubitably important in human history. Longfellow was the first American man of letters to establish for a busy and unlearned people a visible relation between academic culture and actual literary accomplishment. During eighteen of his most productive years, when he was well known to his countrymen as the poet of their simplest sentiments, he was a teacher of modern languages and literature at Harvard College. The poet who delighted the common heart with sweet song and pleasant ballad was Professor Longfellow. As a rule professors write books which are useful only to other professors and to students obedient to academic prescription. From Professor Longfellow's study a voice reached the popular ear. This man, official tutor in an institution monastically remote from the life of the toiling many, could say in wholly intelligible verse how a common man feels who has lost a child; he knew how to touch the despair of drudgery and raise it to confidence and a sense of personal dignity. He honoured in a plain unpatronizing way the village blacksmith, and in every American village the blacksmith is a useful citizen. He had a heart for ships and shipbuilders, and he gave new meaning to the Fourth-of-July orator's figure of the "ship of state" by symbolizing it in a real ship of hewn timbers. Long poems are hard to read, and solid pages of verse repel the unaccustomed reader, but Longfellow told the stories of Evangeline, Miles Standish and Hiawatha in verse almost as easy to read as prose. The poet-professor, who was the emissary of academic culture to the untutored, was also the ambassador of creative literature to a museum of intellectual antiquities in which Greek roots were esteemed above the flowers of living song. This poet with fine manners, dignity and delicate taste, lover of music, responsive to the contemporary songs of the nations, bore a torch of living culture among rusty grammarians and the hebraical sons of a decadent but still stupid Puritanism. His successor, Lowell, and his friend, Norton, carried the torch on, and then it went out; there came the time when the teaching of modern literature in American universities, at Harvard certainly, was divided between philologists on the one hand, men with no literary sense, who reduce Shakespeare and Milton to archæological specimens, and, on the other hand, amiable dilettanti who illustrate the truth of Tanner's epigram: "He who can does; he who cannot teaches." Longfellow and Lowell were beneficent blunderers into that realm of degreed and |