"A poet hidden in the light of ters. And as a poet, his verse was the sublimation of his rarest mood, that changed as water into cloud, catching the first beams of sunrise on its broken edges, yet not without dark and vaguely blending spots between. Emerson and Longfellow came at the parting of the ways. They are of the very few whom we now recognize as the true founders of an American literature. No successors with more original art and higher imagination can labor to more purpose. If the arrow hits its mark, the aim was at the bowstring; the river strengthens and broadens, but the sands of gold wash down from near its source. Not a few are content with that poetry which returns again and again to its primal conceptions, yet thought." suggests infinite pathways and always inspires, "Unbod ied joy." -―― - the poetry of a hermitage whose Lar is Nature, and whose well-spring flows with clear and shining Thought. To such, who care less for sustained flights of objective song, who can withdraw themselves from passion and dramatic life, who gladly accept isolated cadences and scattered, though exquisite, strains of melody in lieu of symphonic music "wandering on as loth to die," Emerson will seem the most precious of our native poets. He will not satisfy those who look for the soul incarnate in sensuous and passionate being. Such readers, with Professor Dowden, find him the type of the New World transcendentalist, the creature of the drying American climate, one "whose nervous energy has been exalted," so "that he loves light better than warmth." He is not the minstrel for those who would study men in action and suffering, rather than as heirs to knowledge and the raptured mind. He is not a warrior, lover, raconteur, dramatist, but an evangelist and seer. The greatest poet must be all in one, and I have said that Emerson A FORERUNNER. of the bard. 179 was among the foremost to avow it. Modern bards Emerson's poorly satisfy him, being meagre of design, and fail- conception ing to guide and console. Wordsworth was an ex-future ception, yet he had "written longer than he was inspired." Tennyson, with all his tune and color, "climbs no mount of vision." Even Shakespeare was too traditional, though one learns from him that "tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can." In face of the greatest he felt that "the world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with equal inspiration." Thus clearly he conceived of the poet's office, and equally was he assured that he himself was not, and could not be, the perfect musician. He chose the part of the forerunner and inspirer, and when the true poet shall come to America, it will be because such an one as Emerson has gone before him and prepared the way for his song, his vision, and his recognition. Fortunate in life and death. His mis sion apostolic. Ο CHAPTER VI. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. I. UR poet of grace and sentiment left us in the after-glow of an almost ideal career. He had lived at the right time, and with the gift of years; and he died before the years came for him to say, I have no pleasure in them. Not all the daughters of music were brought low. He scarcely could have realized that people were calling his work elementary, that men whose originality had isolated them, like Emerson and Browning, and even metrical experts, the inventors of new modes, were gaining favor with a public which had somewhat outgrown him; that he was to be slighted for the very qualities which had made him beloved and famous, or that other qualities, too long needed, were to be overvalued as if partly for the need's sake. But they are wrong who make light of Longfellow's service as an American poet. His admirers may form no longer a critical majority, yet he surely helped to quicken the New World sense of beauty, and to lead a movement which precedes the rise of a national school. I think that the poet himself, reading his own sweet songs, felt the apostolic nature of his mission, that it was religious, in the etymological sense of the word, the binding back of America to the Old World taste and imagination. Our true rise of Poe CHARM OF HIS EARLY WORK. try may be dated from Longfellow's method of exciting an interest in it, as an expression of beauty and feeling, at a time when his countrymen were ready for something more various and human than the current meditations on nature. It was inevitable that he should first set his face toward a light beyond the sea, and I have said that his youthful legend aptly was Outre Mer. An escape was in order from the asceticism which two centuries had both modified and confirmed. How could this be effected? Not at once by the absolute presentation of beauty. A Keats, pledged to this alone, could not have propitiated the ancestral spirit. Puritanism was opposed to beauty as a strange god, and to sentiment as an idle thing. Longfellow so adapted the beauty and sentiment of other lands to the convictions of his people, as to beguile their reason through the finer senses, and speedily to satisfy them that loveliness and righteousness may go together. His poems, like pictures seen on household walls, were a protest against barrenness and the symptoms of a new taste. works. 181 They made their way more readily, also, by their Effect of response to the inherited Anglo-Saxon instincts of his early his own region. His early predilections, strengthened during a stay in Germany, were chiefly for the poetry and romance of that land. He read his heart in its songs, which he so loved to translate for us. A new generation may be at a loss to conceive the effect of Longfellow's work when it first began to appear. I may convey something of this by what is at A charm once a memory and an illustration. Take the case of recalled a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a decaying Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of the old Congregational type. The interior- plain, colorless, rigid with dull white pews and dismal galleries | and illus trated. not creative, but the fos terer of taste and ideality. - increased the spiritual starvation of a young nature unconsciously longing for color and variety. Many a child like this one, on a first holiday visit to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, the roofs and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a sense of something rich and strange; and many, now no longer children, can remember that the impression upon entrance was such as the stateliest cathedral now could not renew. The columns and tinted walls, the ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of gules and azure and gold, - - the service, moreover, with its chant and organ-roll, all this enraptured and possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded which even was added a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty and sanctity of human art. A similar delight awaited the first readers of Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and romancer indeed, who had journeyed far and returned with gifts for all at home, and who promised often and again to "sing a more wonderful song Or tell a more marvellous tale." And thus it chanced that, well as he afterward sang of his own sea and shore, he now is said to have His genius been the least national of our poets. His verse, it is true, was like a pulsatory cord, sustaining our newborn ideality with nourishment from the mother-land, until it grew to vigor of its own. Yet he was more widely read than his associates, and seemed to foreigners the incumbent American laureate. His native themes, like some of Tennyson's, were chosen with deliberation and as if for their availability. But from the first he was a poet of sentiment, and equally a craftsman of unerring taste. He always gave of his |