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tween creative work and work which is fundamentally academic.

But this is more than enough of Longfellow's faults and limitations. He has passed from us too lately to permit us to dwell upon the singular serenity and beauty of his personal life and character. No one can read its records or remember anything of its facts without feeling the rare quality of a nature which throughout a lifetime could persist unspoiled by prosperity and unbroken by poignant personal sorrows. Το be sure, he was never passionate; neither in his life nor in his verse does he ever seem to have been swept away by feeling. On the other hand, as we have seen, his taste was unerring, and his sentiment gently sympathetic. His real office was to open the flood-gates of that modern literature in whose flashing beauty he delighted, and whose murky depths he never quite suspected. And if the verse in which he set forth his delight be hardly of the kind which enriches world-literature, its lucidity of phrase and its delicacy of rhythm combine to give it a sentimental beauty which must long endear it to those who love simplicity of heart.

Thereby, after all, Longfellow comes very near a worldold definition of literary greatness, which has sometimes been held the virtue of those who think the thoughts of the wise and who speak the language of the simple. It may be that he knew few wise thoughts which were all his own; but he so truly loved the wisdom and the beauty of those elder literatures which he was the first of Americans fully to recognise, that he absorbed in a way of his own the wisdom which the good and the great of the past had gleaned from experience. At first, to be sure, it may seem that those considerable parts of his work which deal with our native country are of another stripe. More and more, however, one grows to feel that, despite the subjects, these are not indigenous in sentiment. Rather, for the first time, they illuminate our American past with a glow of conventional romance. So by and by we find

that our gently academic poet has just been thinking about New England in such moods as he loved in countless old-world poets who early and late recorded the historic romance of Europe. Yet Longfellow does not seem to have been consciously imitative. He sincerely believed that he was making spontaneous American poetry. Whatever his lack of passion. or imagination, he was never false to himself. Whether he ✓ ever understood his mission it is hard to say; but what that mission was is clear; and so is the truth that he was a faithful missionary. Never relaxing his effort to express in beautiful language meanings which he truly believed beautiful, he revealed to the untutored new world the romantic beauty of the old.

Very lately, to be sure, an American man of letters, who has the happiness personally to remember our elder days, has said that great injustice is now done Bryant, by neglecting the influence of his translations from the Spanish. To many, it is said, these afforded a first, fascinating glimpse into the world of romance. Historically, then, Bryant may perhaps be held to have pointed out the way which Longfellow so faithfully followed. Certainly, however, Bryant's translations are no longer generally familiar; and Longfellow's still speak, as they spoke from the beginning, to the hearts of the people. Leader or follower, Longfellow worthily remains the most popular poet of his country.

In 1880 he wrote for "Ultima Thule," the last volume which he published, a final poem, entitled "The Poet and his Songs" :

"As the birds come in Spring,

We know not from where;
As the stars come at evening
From depths of the air;

"As the rain comes from the cloud
And the brook from the ground;

As suddenly, low or loud,

Out of silence a sound;

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"As the grape comes to the vine,

The fruit to the tree;

As the wind comes to the pine,
And the tide to the sea;

"As come the white sails of ships
O'er the ocean's verge;

As comes the smile to the lips,
The foam to the surge;

"So come to the Poet his songs,
All hitherward blown

From the misty realm, that belongs
To the vast unknown.

"His, and not his, are the lays
He sings; and their fame
Is his, and not his; and the praise
And the pride of a name.

"For voices pursue him by day

And haunt him by night,

And he listens and needs must obey,

When the Angel says: 'Write!'"

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Few men ever phrased more sweetly what seemed to them the deepest facts of their artistic lives. In the gentleness of this phrasing, as well as in the triteness of this imagery, there is something which tells at once of Longfellow's limitations and of his power. Thinking the thoughts of the wise, without suspicion that the wisdom was not always quite his own; speaking the language of the simple, with no consciousness of the commonplaces which lurk so near simplicity, he believed till the end that to him the Angel had said "Write!" To him this injunction seemed as divine as any that Muse ever spoke to singer of pristine Greece, or that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit ever breathed into the heart of Hebrew prophet. The man would be bold who should reflectively say to-day that this pure, true life and work, lived and done by the most popular poet of our Renaissance, is not, after all, as admirable as many which our later moods of criticism have been apt to think greater.

XII

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

IN 1854 Longfellow resigned the Smith professorship at Harvard College. The next year James Russell Lowell was appointed his successor. Up to this time Lowell's career, though more limited than Longfellow's, had been similar. Sprung from a family already distinguished, which throughout the nineteenth century has displayed high quality both in private and in civic life, he was born at Cambridge in 1819, the son of a Unitarian minister, whose church was in Boston. He grew up in Cambridge. In 1838 he took his degree at Harvard; he studied law; but he found this profession distasteful, and his true interest was in letters. For fifteen For fifteen years before his appointment to the Smith professorship, then, he had been professionally a literary man. From this time on, for a full twenty-two years, his ostensible profession became what Longfellow's had been from 1836 to 1854, and Ticknor's from 1817 to 1835, the teaching of modern languages and literature to Harvard undergraduates.

The different tasks to which the successive Smith professors addressed themselves might once have seemed a question of different personalities; to-day, however, they seem rather a question of developing American culture. When Ticknor's work began, the names of Dante and Cervantes were hardly more familiar in America than that of the Japanese painter Hokusai is to-day. Ticknor's business, then, was to introduce to New England a fresh range of learning; and accordingly his most characteristic publication was the comprehensive, accurately unimaginative "History of Spanish Literature." When, after twenty years, Longfellow succeeded him, Amer

ica knew modern literature by name, but, except perhaps for Bryant's translations, hardly more. Could anything have alleviated the drudgery of teaching, then, for a temperament always yearning to create, it would have been such a task as thus became Longfellow's. In brief, this was to make pupils enjoy excursions into that limitless world of modern literature which for America was still newly discovered. In 1855, when Lowell came to his work, the conditions had altered again. The main facts of modern literature had become almost classically familiar; and the influences which had expressed themselves in the various phases of New England Renaissance had greatly stimulated excellent general reading. To the generation with which Lowell came to his maturity, then, the great modern masters Spenser and Shakspere, Dante and Cervantes and Goethe-were as freshly delightful as the old Greeks had been to the culture of fifteenth-century Italy. They were not yet stale. But scholarship cannot stagnate; modern literature had been discovered, it had been enthusiastically explored, and now came the task of understanding it. So as a college teacher, and as a critical writer too, Lowell's professional task proved interpretative.

The way in which he addressed himself to this task, and the ends he accomplished, were humorously illustrated not long ago when two Harvard men chanced to meet, who had been pupils of Lowell twenty-five years before. One happened to have in his hand a copy of the "Song of Roland." His friend, glancing at it, was reminded of the old times and said rather enthusiastically: "How Lowell used to give us the spirit of that!”—“Yes,” replied the other, who is an eminent philologist, "and that was all he gave us." In which emphatic little adjective is implied the phase which the study of modern literature has now assumed. This range of human expression has been discovered, it has been enjoyed, an attempt has been made to understand its spirit, and now, if

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