I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light

From the celestial walls!"

or in the figure inspired by the gun-barrels in the arsenal at Springfield ranged and shining like the pipes of an organ:

"Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,

When the death-angel touches those swift keys!"

But these things are too infrequent to be considered characteristic we do not recognize them as like Longfellow. He was something more than a poet of fancy, but in the fields of the imagination his range was in the lowlands.

His faculty is best described as one that was mainly receptive and assimilative. He had a true instinct for beauty, and he showed his appreciation of any beauty in another's work by frankly borrowing it for his own. He never disgraced it; usually, unless it came from a very high source, he bettered it in the borrowing. If this was not genius, it was a talent for detecting and advertising genius, for turning to the best account the best that the world's literature could afford. For example, Tennyson published Locksley Hall, and immediately afterward Longfellow composed The Belfry of Bruges in the same metre and with something of the same phrasing. This practice, which came from his habit of composing in his study and relying on his books for inspiration, naturally brought upon him charges of imitating. Wide readers and critics, like Poe, knew the sources, and, as they read his poems, could not help being reminded of them. The nature of the imitation may be learned by comparing The Building of the Ship or Keramos with Schiller's Song of the Bell, or, for a minor instance, The Slave in the Dismal Swamy with Moore's Ballad, "They made her a grave, too cold and damp." But Longfellow never answered the charges, both because they were in part true and because, as far as they

were true, there was nothing in them to cause him shame. He was acting honorably; even when the imitation was most obvious he added enough of his own to justify him, and al' right-minded readers were grateful to him for exercising his faculty so happily. Besides, any doubt of his being a poet in his own right could always be allayed by turning to such songs of genuine, spontaneous utterance as The Bridge, or The Day is Done, or My Lost Youth.

His versatility was greater than that of any other American poet. Though most at ease in lyric poetry, he essayed also, as we have seen, both epic and dramatic, with the minor varieties of ballad and pastoral. As a story-teller in verse he belongs to that band of English rhymers led by Chaucer and Scott. He was almost as thorough a romanticist, too, as Scottsteeped in mediævalism and Germanism. In form, his range was as wide as in substance. He tried all forms, and seemed to master one as easily as another, with the single exception of heroic blank verse, which was too stately for his agile Muse. But the mastership, which in blank verse he has to yield to Bryant, he holds in an equally difficult form. As a sonnet writer he has had no rival in America. Indeed, one might support the assertion that Longfellow wrote no greater poetry than is to be found in some of his sonnets, as the Divina Commedia series, Three Friends of Mine, Milton, or Nature.

Through these things his simplicity, his breadth, his receptive faculty, his versatility-Longfellow became our great teacher. He was a scholar himself, to begin with,-one of America's earliest and best. He was the first person on this side of the Atlantic to write upon Anglo-Saxon. He led many a student to a knowledge of the modern languages and literatures, and by his translations and adaptations spread far and wide their benignant influence. But most of all he assisted in the spread of culture through the subtle influence of his art.

He was an artist to the finger-tips. In this respect he far outran Bryant and was a revelation to a Puritan world. And mark how he reached that world. Poe could not do it, for pure art and imagination would not avail. But Longfellow, though there were no theologians among his ancestors, had the strong moral bias of his New England environment; like Bryant, though in less degree, he was given to meditating and moralizing; and all the while his readers, who went to him for counsel and cheer, were unconsciously succumbing to the witcheries of song and learning to like the very things they had been taught to fear or despise. It was but another step to the drama, to music, to painting and sculpture. Thus it became Longfellow's mission to soften the asperities of a narrow creed and life. Perhaps the slight sentimentalism that clings to his work, as to Irving's, was a necessary part of this disciplinary task. We can pardon his fondness for exclamation points and pretty figures of speech when we contemplate the large result. Nor if, after we have learned to like such things as "footprints on the sands of time" and "forget-me-nots of the angels," we find that our poetic education is not complete until Tennyson and Shakespeare and Dante have taught us to dislike them again, should we turn with ingratitude from our first teacher, who made the second lesson possible.

Finally, and once more like Irving, Longfellow has a high claim to our admiration in his fundamental, serene humanity. Scholarly though he was, bookish, and often getting his inspiration at second hand, he was never scholastic, technical, obscure, or dry. Love is more than wisdom, and in every line that Longfellow wrote there beats a kindly human heart. Rarely does he count to us intellectually so much as emotionally. He fought shy of analysis, put quietly by the problems and stress of his age, if indeed he felt them, remaining to the

end an ardent lover of beauty and peace; and over all his

poetry broods

A Farmer
Boy.

"A Sabbath sound, as of doves

In quiet neighborhoods."

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892

Another poet in whom love of human nature was a marked trait was born north of Boston in the same year as Longfellow— John Greenleaf Whittier. Little of the scholar, however, is to be found in this New England Quaker, whose lot it was to pass from the plow to politics and from politics to literature. He was born in 1807 in East Haverhill, a rugged, hilly section of Essex County, in the extreme north-east corner of Massachusetts. In the southern part of the same county lies Salem, the birthplace of Hawthorne. The home of Whittier was in a country district; the town of Haverhill was three miles away, and to this day no roof is in sight from the old homestead. The house, considerably more than a hundred years old at the poet's birth, was built by his greatgreat-grandfather. The Whittiers were mostly stalwart men, six feet in height, who lived out their three-score and ten years. The poet, though his years were more than any of his immediate ancestors', fell a little short of the family stature and was of slender frame. He attributed his delicate health to the hard work and exposure of his youth. He milked cows, "grubbed stumps," built boulder fences, threshed grain with a flail, wore no flannels in the coldest weather, and woke often of winter mornings to find upon his coverlet siftings of snow. Something of this may be learned from Snow-Bound, which is a faithful picture of the Whittier homestead and household as they were eighty years ago.

It was a life utterly without luxury and with few means of culture. The family, however, was one of the most respected

in the community, and could draw to its fireside intelligent ac quaintances, among them itinerant ministers of the Friends, to which sect it belonged. There were perhaps thirty books in the house, largely Quaker tracts and journals. Of course, there was the Bible, and through all his poetry Whittier reverts to the Bible for phrases and images as naturally as Keats reverts to classical mythology or Longfellow to mediæval legend. Memorable were the evenings when the school-teacher came and read to the family from books he brought with him—one most memorable when the book was a copy of Burns. On Whittier's first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat and a broad-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered with drab velvet, he purchased a copy of Shakespeare. One of the Waverley novels, its author as yet unknown, fell into his hands and was read eagerly, -but the parents did not share in that reading.

He attended the district school a few weeks each winter; the nature of his schooling may be judged from the poem To My Old Schoolmaster. When he was nineteen he com

From School to

pleted his scanty education with a year at an acadJournalism emy in Haverhill. From the time when the reading and Politics. of Burns woke the poet within him, he was constantly writing rhymes, covering his slate with them and sometimes copying them out on foolscap. William Lloyd Garrison, soon afterward to be the leader of the abolition movement, had started his Free Press in a neighboring town. Whittier's father, interested in all philanthropic enterprises, was a subscriber, and to it Whittier's sister sent, without his knowledge, one of his poems. Thus began at once his literary and his political career. Garrison became interested in his new contributor, and the story has often been told of how the smart young editor drove out to the country home and Whittier was called