TEN-MINUTE TALKS.

66

I.

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

IN passing last year by the gate of Craigie House in Cambridge that large house which was Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston, and was afterward the residence of Longfellow-I met a young man who was asking some bystanders where to find the spreading chestnut tree" where Longfellow's "village blacksmith " once lived and worked. Informing him that the tree was gone, but that I could show him where it once stood, I led him along the street to the spot, telling him as we walked that the actual name of the village blacksmith was Dexter Pratt, and that the wife mentioned in the poem was Rowena Pratt, my nurse in childhood. He in return told me that he had only just landed from Ireland, that the poem in question was the first he had ever learned at school, and that the scene of the poem was the very first place his footsteps had sought on arrival in America.

This, thought I, is genuine fame; to make out of the

simple scenes and personages of everyday life a picture which so touches the universal heart of man that although an ocean may roll between the poet and his reader they yet love the very places he has mentioned. No Englishspeaking man except Shakespeare, Scott, and Burns ever produced this impression more widely than did Longfellow. Almost every day in summer one may see strangers stopping at the gate of Craigie House and looking inward; people follow the famous ride of Paul Revere with Longfellow's poem in hand; no one visits Grand Pré or the falls of Minnehaha without quoting him; and I once bought at Heidelberg a little German edition of “Hyperion," sold as a guide-book to the place. His poems have been translated into more languages-probably fifteen in all-than those of all other American poets together, and no American prose writer has rivalled him in this respect except Mrs. Stowe. This is a genuine and desirable fame. Whether it is necessarily the final and absolute test of fame we cannot tell; for this reward is a plant of slow growth, and it takes centuries to judge of it; but it is the most enjoyable kind of fame, and one peculiarly appropriate to the modest, kindly nature of this poet.

Besides his literary work he did, until 1854, the duties of his professorship, although these became in time very irksome, and he often laments in his diaries over their fatiguing character. But he left a delightful impression on his pupils, as I can testify, and carried them beyond their technical studies into the real spirit of the French and Italian literatures. He had also the great merit, then less common than now, of a perfect courtesy of manner,

being probably the first teacher in Harvard University to introduce the practice, now general, of addressing the students as "Mr." The influence of this, and of the spirit which prompted it, was so great, that at an incipient rebellion about 1841, when a crowd of students had gathered in the college yard in the evening and had refused to listen to any other professor, there was a general hush when he spoke, and a voice cried: "We will hear Professor Longfellow; he always treats us like gentlemen." In this, as in all ways, he left a priceless combination of high intellectual service with a beautiful human character. His self-control and generosity of spirit were so great that he never had an enemy; even the jealous and vindictive Poe while defaming him could not pick a quarrel with him.

II.

BY HENRY JOHNSON, PH.D.,

Longfellow Professor of Modern Languages, Bowdoin College.

Longfellow merits special consideration as a scholarly poet of great breadth of knowledge and attainment. His attitude of mind toward the productions of other poets was, through his entire career, that of a respectful, appreciative student. His undergraduate life at Bowdoin had been marked by a fond interest in Horace, some of whose poems he had translated with notable success. His studies in Europe, by way of preparation for his in