began to desire something similar there. The intention of Longfellow's father had been that his son should study for the bar; and the boy, who had hardly ever been out of Maine, had no more obvious qualification for a professorship of modern languages than the fact that he had been a good scholar in an old-fashioned classical college. His enthusiastic love for literature, however, was soon recognised as what the godly would call a vocation; in 1826 he went abroad under an agreement to prepare himself, by a three years' study of modern languages, for a Bowdoin professorship which should resemble Ticknor's at Harvard. Like some old pilgrim to Christian Rome, he set forth, wonderingly ignorant of the truths which he thus proposed apostolically to proclaim. In 1829 he came home with a reading knowledge of Spanish, Italian, French, and German, and began to teach at Bowdoin. In this work he persisted for six years. In 1835, Ticknor grew tired of his professorship, and chancing to possess fortune decided to give up teaching. The question of his successor having presented itself, Ticknor discerned no man in America better qualified to follow him than Longfellow. He recommended Longfellow to the Corporation of Harvard; and Longfellow, who up to that time had had little personal relation with Cambridge, accepted the Smith professorship. To prepare himself for this wider field of work, he went abroad for a year more. In 1836 he began his teaching at Harvard, which continued for eighteen years.

Longfellow's temper, like Ticknor's, proved increasingly impatient of distracting academic routine. As must always be the case with men of literary ambition, he felt more and more how gravely the drudgery of teaching must interfere with work which time may well prove more lasting and significant. His constant, enthusiastic wish was to be a poet. In 1854, then, he resigned the professorship in turn. The next year it was given to James Russell Lowell, who held it, at least in title, until his death in 1891.

Since then the Smith professorship has remained vacant. When it may again be filled is uncertain; but one thing seems sure. For seventy-five years it had only three tenants, George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. When Ticknor began his work modern literature was virtually unknown to America; when Lowell died, modern literature was as familiar to this whole continent as ever were the classics. Meanwhile almost all the literature which our continent has yet produced, and certainly all the memorable literature of New England, had come into existence. In the literary history of New England no three names are more honourable than those of the three Smith professors. Nor is it invidious to add that there is no living man of letters in America who could be invited to the Smith professorship with any hope of increasing or even of maintaining its established personal distinction.

Up to 1854, Longfellow, although already popular as a poet, remained professionally a college professor of a new and radical subject; his business was to introduce into the mental and spiritual life of Harvard students that range of thought and feeling which since classical times has been gathering its records in Europe. Though he always loved his subject, he hated the use which his professional circumstances compelled him to make of it. The instinct which made him recoil from the drudgery of teaching was sound. He is remembered as a faithful teacher; but anybody can teach faithfully, and no faithfulness can make Yankee students very eager pupils. Longfellow's true mission was not to struggle with unwilling hearers; it was rather to set forth in words which should find their way to the eager readers of a continent the spirit as distinguished from the letter of the literatures with which as a professor he conscientiously dealt so long.

From 1854 to the end, Longfellow lived as a professional author in that fine old Cambridge house which before his time was conspicuous as the deserted mansion of some Tories exiled

by the Revolution, and which is now consecrated as the home of the most widely popular and beloved American poet. Long before he died, in 1882, his reputation as a man of letters had so far transcended any other aspect of his work that people had almost forgotten how he had once been a college teacher.

For this forgetfulness there is plenty of reason. Though throughout Longfellow's professorship he had felt its duties seriously to prevent literary labour, he had produced during his incumbency much of his most familiar verse. His "Voices of the Night" appeared in 1839, his " Evangeline" in 1847, and his "Golden Legend" in 1851. Already, then, before he laid his professorship down, there were hundreds who knew him as a poet for every one who knew him as a college teacher. In point of fact, too, the work which he did during the twenty-seven years of his purely literary life hardly extended, although it certainly maintained, the reputation as a poet which he had already established during his twenty-five years of teaching. To understand his real character as a poet, however, we must constantly keep in mind that other profession of teacher which he so faithfully practised for a full third of his life.

The subjects which Longfellow taught now have a familiar place in every respectable institution of the higher learning from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In his time, they resembled some new discovered continent, where whole realms of country are still unvisited by man. To Longfellow, accordingly, the true business of his professorship seemed like that of an enthusiastic explorer. The languages which he learned so eagerly never seemed to him deserving of lifelong study for themselves; they were merely vehicles of expression which carried him into new and wonderful worlds of beautiful old humanity. These vehicles were to be cared for so far as they are efficient; they were to be loved so far as in beautiful form they convey to us thoughts intrinsically beautiful and noble; but they were

at best vehicles whose use was to lead him into inexhaustible regions of humanity, unknown except by vague tradition to his countrymen who had gone before him.

In his love for literature thus considered, Longfellow never wavered. What vexed him throughout the years of his teaching was not the matter with which he dealt; it was rather that he shrank from imparting literature to unwilling pupils, that he longed to saturate himself with it and to express unfettered the sentiments which it unfailingly stirred within him. These sentiments, which he uttered in a manner so welcome to all America, seemed to him as spontaneous as ever inspiration seemed to poets who have heard the true whisper of the Muse. Yet one who now studies his work can hardly help feeling that even though he never suspected the fact, his temper as a man of letters was almost as academic as was the profession to which he reluctantly devoted year after year of his maturity.

The task of universities is to deal not so much with actual life as with the records of it. From eldest time human beings have left traces of what their earthly experience has

In efforts to preserve, to understand, to elucidate these traces of the vanished past and vanished men, scholars exhaust energy enough for any human lifetimes. They are bound, then, to drift away from actuality. Their lives are employed, and importantly, in gleaning from books material which shall engender the scholarship and the books of the future. Now, Longfellow's temper, even as a teacher, was that of a man of letters; he felt constantly stirred to what he believed original expression, and he was never content unless he was phrasing as well as he could the emotions which arose within him amid all the drudgery of work. But if in this aspect Longfellow was a genuine man of letters, he was all the while an academic scholar; for the influence which stirred. him most was not what he experienced, but rather what he read. From beginning to end he was inspired chiefly, if not

wholly, by noble and beautiful records of facts long since dead and gone.

Though this limitation marks Longfellow apart from those great poets who have immortally expressed the meaning of actual life, it had at once the grace of sincerity, and the added grace of that natural gift which was perhaps Longfellow's ↓ most salient. His taste was unerring. Wherever he met the beauties of literature he delighted in them with inexhaustible zest; and in his instinctive feelings about literature there was something very like the guileless confidence in human nature which inspired the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists. For a little while the national inexperience of New England had so freed it from the vileness of dense humanity that in religion, in philosophy, in morals, the most earnest minds could honestly believe uppermost in mankind those traits which are best. In the literatures which Longfellow loved we can to-day see endless depths of baseness; and to-day we know these literatures so well that we can hardly neglect such shadows. To Longfellow, on the other hand, these whole regions of æsthetic delight were so fresh that he could delight in their beauties, which he perceived with such instant tact, and could honestly be blind to everything not beautiful or noble. His mood resembled that of some simple American boy who with all the innocence of our native youth is suddenly brought face to face with the splendours of European civilisation. Such a boy overwhelmingly feels the beauties which survive from an illimitable past. The evil and the turmoil of the days which produced the sculpture of Greece, or the painting of Italy, or the architecture of Gothic Europe, are dead and gone. To discover them nowadays demands the scrutiny of a scientific scholarship for which an untutored American boy is still immature. Intoxicated with delight in the beauty which old humanity has wrought, he is not even aware that about him grovels a social corruption baser than his native inexperience has ever dreamed on. From dreams