England, is of all our styles the best adapted to the Atlantic States; and it still becomes us to be modest in defining the types that American art and poetry finally will assume. The critical question, I take it, is not what fashion should be outlawed, but whether the thing done is good of its kind.

Nothing afterward tempted Longfellow from poetic composition, except the illustrations of the Poetry of Europe, many of which were his own translations, and, late in life, the diversion of editing Poems of Places, and the heroic labor of his complete version of "The Divine Comedy," a work to which I shall refer again.

Poetical works.

"Voices

III.

LONGFELLOW's juvenile poems have been collected recently. Those printed, before his graduation, in "The Literary Gazette," resemble the verse of Bryant and Percival, the former of whom he looked upon as his master. Tracings of browsing in the usual pasture grounds are strangely absent: I sometimes wonder if he had an early taste for the Elizabethan poets, or, indeed, for any English worthy, since no modern author has shown fewer signs of this in youth. The Voices of the Night, his own first collection, was postponed until after a long experience of translation and prose work. It appeared in his thirty-third year, and met with instant favor. Only nine new pieces were in the book; these, with the translations following, have characteristics that his verse continued to disForeign play. The Prelude recalls that of Heine's third ediinfluences. tion of the "Reisebilder" (Das ist der alte Märchenwald), then just published. Later pieces show that Longfellow caught the manner of this poet, whose principles he severely condemned. The German's

of the Night,"

1839.

EARLY LYRICS AND BALLADS.

rhythm and reverie were repeated in "The Day is Done," "The Bridge," "Twilight," etc., but not his passion and scorn. The influence of Uhland is equally manifest clsewhere. Prototypes of Longfellow's maturer work are found in "The Reaper," "The Psalm of Life," and "The Beleaguered City." "The Midnight Mass for the Dying Year," against which Poe brought a mincing charge of plagiarism, is as strong and conjuring as anything its author lived to write. The Translations deserved high praise. The stately "Coplas" re-appears. Various renderings from German lyric poets, such as "The Happiest Land," "Beware," and "Into the Silent Land," were new originals, examples of a talent peculiarly his own. Given a task which he liked, with a pattern supplied by another, - and few could equal him. He made his copies in various measures and from many tongues. An essay in hexameter, the version of Tegnér's "Children of the Lord's Supper," preceded his original poems in that form. Even after completing his "Dante," he loved to toy with such work. I have heard him say that he longed to make an English translation of Homer, upon the method which Voss had used to such advantage.

189

"Ballads and Other

Cp. "Vic

pp. 158160.

His volume of 1841, Ballads and Other Poems, may be likened to Tennyson's volume of the ensuing Poems," year, in that it confirmed its author's standing and 1841. indicated the full extent of his genius as a poet. It torian was choice in its way, suggesting taste rather than Poets": fertility; choicely presented, also, for with it came the fashion, new to this country, of printing verse attractively and in a shape that seeks the hand. The The poet's poet's matter, if often gleaned from foreign litera-quality tures, was novel to his readers, and his style distinct parent. from that of any English contemporary. The book

now ap

Lyrical homilies.

contains examples of all the classes into which his
poems seem to divide themselves, and may be ex-
amined with its successors. One sees, forthwith, that
Longfellow's impulse was to make a poem, above all,
interesting. He was no word-monger, no winder of
coil upon coil about a subtle theme. He changed his
topics, for some topic he must have, and one that
suited him. A cheerful acceptance of the lessons of
life was the moral, suggested in many lyrics, which
commended him to all virtuous, home-keeping folk,
but in the end poorly served him with the critics.
He gained a foothold by his least poetic work,
whose easy lessons are adjusted to common needs ;
by the "Psalm of Life," "Excelsior," "Prometheus,"
and "The Ladder of St. Augustine,"
- little sermons

-verse

in rhyme that are sure to catch the ear and to become hackneyed as a sidewalk song. He often taught, by choice, the primary class, and the upper Sentiment. form is slow to forget it. Next above these pretty homilies are his poems of sentiment and twilight brooding. "The Reaper and the Flowers," "Footsteps of Angels," "Maidenhood," "Resignation," and "Haunted Houses came home to pensive and gentle natures. Lowell has written a few kindred pieces, such as "The Changeling" and "The First Snowfall." A still higher class, testing Longfellow's eye for the suggestive side of a theme and his art to make the most of it, includes "The Fire of DriftWood," "The Lighthouse," "Sand of the Desert," "The Jewish Cemetery," and "The Arsenal." In poems of this sort he was a skilled designer, yet they were something more than art for art's sake. Owing to the tenderness seldom absent from his work, he often has been called a poet of the Affections. It must be owned that he was a poet of the Tastes as

Pictur

isqueness.

QUALITY OF HIS GENIUS.

well. He combined beauty with feeling in lyrical Taste. trifles which rival those of Tennyson and other masters of technique, and was almost our earliest maker of verse that might be termed exquisite. "The Bells of Lynn" and "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," show that the hand which polished "Curfew and "The Arrow and the Song" was sensitive to the last.

191

reformer.

Among obvious tests of a poet are his voice, facil- Not a ity, and general aim. Longfellow's verse was refined polemic and pleasing; his purpose, evidently not that of a doctrinaire. The anti-slavery poems did not come, like Whittier's, from a fiery heart, or rival Lowell's in humor and disdain. They simply manifest his recognition and artistic treatment of an existing evil. The ballad of "The Quadroon Girl" is a poem, not a prophecy, with a pathos beautified by certain "values," as a painter might term them, the tropic shore, the lagoon, the island planter's daughter and slave. Of Tests of the higher tests of poetic genius, spontaneity, sweep, intellect, imaginative power, what examples has he left us? At times the highest of all, imagination, in passages where he foregoes the conceits and fancies that so possessed him. We have it in the "Midnight Mass"; in "Sir Humphrey Gilbert"; in "The Spanish Jew's Tale," when

straight into the city of the Lord

The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel's sword,

And through the streets there swept a sudden breath
Of something there unknown, which men call death."

genius.

Ballads.

At times also we have what is of almost equal worth, Imaginimaginative treatment. This is felt in the effect of ative his very best lyrics, a series of ballads, with "The "The Skeleton in Armor" at their front both in date and in merit. This vigorous poem opens with a rare abrupt- mor," etc.

Skeleton

in Ar

Occasional
Poems.

ness. The author, full of the Norseland, was inspirited by his novel theme, and threw off a ringing carol of the sea-rover's training, love, adventure. The cadences and imagery belong together, and the measure, that of Drayton's "Agincourt," is better than any new one for its purpose. Even the poet's conceits are braver than their wont :

"Then from those cavernous eyes

Pale flashes seemed to rise,

As when the northern skies
Gleam in December;
And, like the water's flow
Under December's snow,

Came a dull voice of woe

From the heart's chamber."

Elsewhere he is as resonant as the bard of England's

66

'King Harry":

"And as to catch the gale

Round veered the flapping sail,
Death! was the helmsman's hail,
Death without quarter!

Midships with iron keel

Struck we her ribs of steel;

Down her black hulk did reel

Through the black water!"

To old-fashioned people this heroic ballad, written over forty years ago, is worth a year's product of what I may term Kensington-stitch verse. A few others, mostly of the sea, count high in any estimate of Longfellow. "The Wreck of the Hesperus," though not without blemishes, "Sir Humphrey Gilbert," "Victor Galbraith," and "The Cumberland' are treated, I think, imaginatively. Boker's noble stanzas on the sinking of the Cumberland follow more closely the old ballad style, but Longfellow plainly found a style of his own. His "occasional" poems were equally fe