FREE, TYPICAL AND INSPIRING.

When he failed in either, it seemed to be through
excess of divining. His triumphs were full of promise
for those who dare to do their best. He was as far
above Carlyle as the affairs of the soul and universe
are above those of the contemporary, or even the
historic, world. His problem, like that of Archimedes,
was more than the taking of cities and clash of arms.
The poet is unperturbed by temporal distractions; yet
poets and dreamers, concerned with the ideal, share
in the world's battle equally with men of action and
practical life. Only, while the latter fight on the
ground, the idealists, like the dauntless ghosts of the
Huns and Romans, lift the contest to the air.
son was the freest and most ideal of them all, and
what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast
he gave like a victor. He strove not to define the
creeds, but to stimulate the intellect and purpose of
those who are to make the future. If poetry be that
which shapes and elevates, his own was poetry in-
deed. To know the heart of New England you must
hear the songs of his compeers; but listening to those
of Emerson, the east and west have yielded to the
current of its soul.

Emer

The supreme poet will be not alone a seer, but also a persistent artist of the beautiful. Of those who come before the time for such a poet is ripe, Longfellow on the whole has done the most to foster the culture of poetry among us as a liberal art. Emerson has given us thought, the habit of thinking, the will to think for ourselves. He drained the vats of politics and philosophy, for our use, of all that was sweet and fructifying, and taught his people self-judgment, self-reliance, and to set their courses by the stars. He placed chief value upon those primitive laws which are the only sure basis of national law and let

177

Emerson

and Long

fellow.

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.

"A poet Not a few are content with that poetry which rehidden in turns again and again to its primal conceptions, yet the light of thought." suggests infinite pathways and always inspires, 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

"Unbodied joy."

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.

O

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 originaliťỷ 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

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.

181

his early

works.

They made their way more readily, also, by their Effect of response to the inherited Anglo-Saxon instincts of 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 a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a de- trated. caying Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of the old Congregational type. The interior- plain, colorless, rigid with dull white pews and dismal galleries)

recalled

and illus