SH

INCE we began to write this series of biographies, we have been somewhat struck with the representative character of our writers; and were we disposed to follow out our theory on the subject, nothing would be easier than to classify them as Bryant, the moralist; Halleck, the wit; Hawthorne, the recluse; Whittier, the reformer; Holmes, the satirist; Willis, the man-of-the-world; Longfellow, the scholar; and so on through the whole batch. Not one, we believe, but would be found to express some idea in the popular mind, from which he derives his popularity; and not one but would exhibit in his writings the life which he has led, and is leading. We fail to reveal ourselves in action, but not in books; pens, ink, and paper are sad truth-tellers: not but there VOL. III, No. 1.-A

is some deceit in even them, as in the matter of morals-many a vicious man often writing virtuously; but generally, in matters of taste, of mind, of soul, the books of an author are more to be trusted than hearsay reports of his life, and any amount of affidavits thereon. Do what we will, we cannot hide our minds and hearts; they will reveal themselves in thoughts. The thought may be shorn of its beams, or may be gilded brighter than it naturally is, but in either case it cannot be long disguised; something about it, some tone or aroma betrays it, and betrays the source from which it derives its weakness or strength; whether from nature, through familiarity with her outward shows; from other minds, through the medium of personal communication and books: or from

itself through years of self-communion and dreams; we all whisper whence we steal our spoils. To fully develop this idea we should have to write essays equal to those of Emerson. Doubting our ability to do so, (modest man!) we shall not attempt to develop it; but content ourselves with having given the clew, and come back to a subject to which it especially applies, the subject of our present paper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. From what we have said, and shall hereafter say, the reader will know how to classify him.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on the 27th of February, 1807. Of his youth we have no account, save that in his fourteenth year he entered Bowdoin College, from which he graduated in 1825. Then we hear of his prosecuting the study of the law till the college appoints him Professor of Modern Languages; to fit himself for the chair, he, in 1826, sailed for Europe, where he remained three or four years, visiting and residing in England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Holland; returning, he commenced his professional duties, and in 1831 took unto himself a wife. In 1835 the Professorship of Modern Languages and Literature in Harvard College being rendered vacant by the resignation of Mr. George Ticknor, the since author of several bulky tomes on Spanish literature, Longfellow was elected his successor, and, resigning his chair at Bowdoin, he again revisited Europe to make himself a more thorough master of his studies. The summer of '35 was spent in Denmark and Sweden; the autumn and winter in Germany, where he had the misfortune to lose his wife; and the spring and summer of '36 in Switzerland and the Tyrol. Returning to the United States again in the autumn of the latter year, he took the chair at Cambridge, where he has since resided.

The United States Literary Gazette, a feeble, but rather elegant journal of the old time, printed at Boston while Longfellow was an under-graduate, has the merit, it is said, of having first ushered his productions into the world. While professor at Bowdoin he wrote several papers for the North American Review, ("My Grandmother's Review, the British,") translated that heavy Spanish monody, Coplas De Manrique, and published Outre

Mer, or a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea. In 1839 appeared Hyperion, his best prose work, a sort of sentimental journey; and the Voices of the Night, his first collection of poems. In 1841 came his Ballads and other Poems; in 1843 The Spanish Student, a Play; in 1844 Poems on Slavery; and a large octavo volume, the collected edition of his poetical works, which were highly popular. Since that time we have had The Belfry of Bruges; Evangeline, a Tale of Acadia; The SeaSide and the Fire-Side; and The Golden Legend, in poetry; and Cavanah, a Tale, in prose. What he has on hand we know not, but we suspect something; it is about time for us to look for another volume.

Longfellow's present residence is at Cambridge, in the old Cragie house, formerly the head-quarters of Washington. In a beautiful poem addressed to one of his children, he thus alludes to it :

"Once, ah, once within these walls,
One whom memory oft recalls,

The Father of his Country, dwelt;
And yonder meadows, broad and damp,
The fires of the besieging camp

Encircled with a burning belt.
"Up and down these echoing stairs
Weary with the weight of cares

Sounded his majestic tread;
Yes, within this very room
Sat he in those hours of gloom,

Weary both in heart and head."

Here Longfellow resides in elegant style with his wife and children-(there was a second marriage we forgot to say)— surrounded by a rare collection of books, and visited by the great, the wise, the good of both hemispheres. No man in New-England is more popular among his friends and the public at large; and no man, we fancy, more deservedly so. We might turn several neat sentences about his excellent qualities of head and heart; but when we say that he is a man, a gentleman, we say all that is necessary.

A real critique of Longfellow is yet, perhaps, to be written. Enough has been written in the shape of so-called critiques, both of praise and blame; but, as far as we have seen, the heart of the mystery remains yet untouched, or at the most has been but barely indicated, and then forgotten. A thorough analysis has never yet been made, and probably never will be in full; those who could make it not having the inclination, and those who would not having the ability. In the meantime

we wade through seas of general criticism, (save the mark!) which will just as well apply to anybody else, and know no more about Longfellow as he really is than about the man in the moon, a sort of fabulous halo surrounding both.

The first thing that strikes us about Longfellow is his scholarship, his acquaintance with books; we see the professor at once. Not that he ever puts forth his learning ostentatiously, or is in any degree pedantic quite the contrary; but somehow he always reminds us of, and insensibly lapses into books. His themes and their manner of treatment are rather academical than natural; and even when they are natural, it is very apt to be nature in a high state of cultivation. We cannot long resist the bookish bent of his mind, however malapropos it may be either he has no deep sense of fitness and poetic keeping, or else his learning overpowers it. No modern poet save Longfellow, or some poetical professor like him, would think of going into a wood to muse on old monkish legends; and no other modern poet, least of all an American one, would at such a time allude to Pentecost, except in religious poetry, or talk of "bishops' caps" among the flowers. What are bishops' caps, pray? and what are they doing in the woods of America? and what are the leaves doing when they clap their little hands? We are not generally disposed to curtail any man's fancies; but when they are so far-fetched we should like to do so amazingly. Had Longfellow dreamed of the Indians in the forest it would have been natural; had he even dreamed of the Dryads, it would still have been natural; for the old fables of Greece belong to all lands alike, they are so beautiful and worldly; but when he comes to traditions of saint and sage, to "chronicles of old," we feel that he is out of his sphere; he should be among missals and psalters in some old university or cloister, not among flowers and trees in vernal woods,

"Where shadows dark, and sunlight sheen, Alternate come and go."

This, however, is the peculiarity, and, in our way of thinking, the fault of his genius. We are not, let us here remark, of that school of critics who would circumscribe a poet of the nineteenth century to the nineteenth century alone. The world of song is as wide as the illimitable

heavens, and things past, present, and to come, meet in its broad domains lovingly and beautifully. We allow the poet the widest range therein; but while we allow him this range, we would not have him abuse it; nor should he so far forget his own age as to sing of nothing but the ages before him. If the dead are beautiful, surely the living, who have discarded and outgrown so many of their imperfections, are equally so; and while the poet sympathizes with the past, he should love the present in which he works, and the future which is to give him his renown, and lead mankind to nobler destinies. Now this, it seems to us, is the point where Longfellow chiefly fails. For anything in the bulk of his poetry materially to the contrary, it might have been written centuries ago. It would have lacked then its present refinement and elegance, but its general cast and complexion would have been the same. Professor Longfellow sits in his professor's chair, between the kingdoms of the past and future, a kind of scholastic Janus, looking both ways; but his tenderest glance is evidently cast behind him, and his warmest sympathies and loves are with the dead and gone. The stir and tumult of the present fills the scene around him, and the future looms up grandly in the distance; but he turns from both to the dead past, and to its cloud-like pomps and pageants. The landscape of his thoughts is peopled with old feudal castles, and their picturesque inhabitants, lords and ladies, knights and squires, with gray abbeys and cloisters, mitred bishops, friars, and nuns, and minstrels and minnesingers; "Himself not least, but honor'd of them all."

He seems to have been born several

centuries too late. He should have lived, we think, in the days of the Troubadours, and should have contended with them in the courts of love, where he could not but

have been crowned a victor.

His knowledge of nature seems to be drawn exclusively from books; woods, fields, rivers, the sea and sky are but little to him as a poet, whatever they may be to He seldom detects him as a man.

"The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream." But he discovers similarities between nature and art which no other man can, and makes pretty fancies thereon. He talks of spring's armorial bearing, summer's