And I think how many thousands
Of care-encumbered men,

Each bearing his burden of sorrow,
Have crossed the bridge since then.

I see the long procession

Still passing to and fro,

The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow!

And forever and forever,

As long as the river flows,
As long as the heart has passions,
As long as life has woes;

The moon and its broken reflection
And its shadows shall appear,
As the symbol of love in heaven,
And its wavering image here.

THE DAY IS DONE

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village

Gleam through the rain and the mist, And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me That my soul cannot resist :

A feeling of sadness and longing
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,

That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,

Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,

And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume

In a fine sonnet on Tennyson, Longfellow addressed him as the "sweet historian of the heart"; the line may most aptly be fitted to himself. It is because he does

interpret the best instincts of the emotional life of average men and women with simplicity, felicity, and truth, that he will long be cherished; and it is when he in like manner interprets the fundamental human needs and aspirations in the framework of a narrative like "Evangeline" that he performs the same service in his longer poems. There is no particular demerit in making yourself understood in verse by the so-called general reader, although some very precious messages may be more subtle and more uniquely expressed. If Longfellow is not strikingly original, not dynamically great like Browning, or if the magic touch of a Poe is denied him, the good he did will match either of them. One thing he certainly was: a master in verse, an artist of literary expression. And while conceding that he was not a profound thinker, one may not hesitate to ask if it is the first business of the poet to be a profound thinker; if he have not done his duty when by the charm of form and of music he revivifies what is a common property until it seem new and precious.

Longfellow, for all his writing days, worked with high purpose and patient toil at his craft. He believed in the poetic function, he took his task seriously. He polished his works as every good workman should; but once it was given to the world, he did not fuss over it nor pother over the minute changes which make life miserable for the editors of some bards. His devotion to his art had in it something of religious consecration. He knew that poetry when it was true to itself had as lofty a mission as any utterance of man.

When the American who is in London steps into Westminster Abbey-that splendid mausoleum of the worthy dead of a dominant race-nothing in the Poets' Corner

thrills him more, if I may here express my own experience, than to behold the marble bust of Longfellow, the only memorial to a maker of American literature in that historic place. By general consent and the acclaim of two sister peoples he was selected as the bard to represent us there.

The choice is a significant commentary upon the nature of Longfellow's fame at the time of his death. It did not mean that English critical opinion would necessarily accord to him the laurels in American song. But it did express the feeling that the poet had entered into the general current of literature abroad and become more widely influential than any other American. Hence was his name most fittingly inscribed where men who have used the English speech with power and beauty and to purposes of good are remembered by their own people. Longfellow had become a link in the chain which binds us to our kinsmen across the water; and as, gravely lovely in the sculptured stone, he looks down upon a visitor to the great church so full of reverberations of the mighty past, his lips would seem to say: "Lo, we who make beauty in song and story are the true bringers-in of peace; since all mankind may be knit together by the bond of beautiful words and in the broad brotherhood of noble thoughts."

CHAPTER IX

HOLMES

It is hard to realize that in the same year, 1809, which gave birth to Poe, who already seems so far back in our literary history, dying as he did before the middle of the nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, whose slight, alert figure was only yesterday pacing the streets of Boston.

Dr. Holmes, like Bryant, was an octogenarian and saw with the keenest interest and with none of the old-age conservative horror in change, a veritable revolution in scientific and religious thought, indeed, became himself a spokesman of the new truth. He never grew old, — he was eighty years young, as somebody said of him. The work he did in prose and verse took the impress of the finely mundane quality of his genius and made him always a man of his time, interpreting with wit and wisdom the meaning of modern social life. It was by his sunny gift for social interpretation that he won his large audience and will live.

Following what may be called the rule of our New England writers, Holmes came of clerical stock, his father being a Congregational minister of Cambridge, Oliver's birthplace. His mother was a Wendell, as the name implies, of Dutch descent, but also deriving from the colonial Bradstreets, thus connecting him with Anne Brad