tended life-work as professor of modern languages, were literary rather than linguistic. The range of his studies betokens by its breadth an eager sympathy with widely separated peoples and ideals. How few modern students could range with profit over a continent, visiting and studying the peoples and literatures of the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Italy!

Owing to an original sanity of judgment, a pure taste, and a rare assimilative power, Longfellow's individuality seems to have suffered no loss, though both his prose and verse of that period took the colour of the romantic surroundings in which he moved. He put the world of letters under contribution while he himself remained aloof. This mark of genius was certainly his, the inability to lose his personal dignified isolation, no matter how intimate and familiar the subject of his verse. It was easy for him to impart of himself, while it was impossible for him to allow the world to approach too near. The effort at self-confession, which exhausts natures no less poetically endowed than his, was never a part of his life's struggle. The old world was for him rich in storehouses abounding in wealth. What the race had already accomplished in realisation of its ideals of character was to him more attractive than its wealth in works of art. There is an atmosphere of victory already won about his collective work which reflects even in his poems of struggle the mastery which he himself had attained.

The selection of European poets represented in "Poets and Poetry of Europe," with its supplement, is extremely

hospitable, well deserving the title of collection which the poet himself judged properly to belong to it. Aside from its considerable intrinsic value, it is especially significant in a study of Longfellow as an index of his cosmopolitan taste. As proof of mere diligence it is far from contemptible, with its list of over four hundred poets, Longfellow himself contributing translations from eight foreign languages. The chronological list of his poems shows constant interest in the work of translation throughout his life. The great success which the poet attained in translation is due in part at least to his fidelity to himself. To him translating was an exercise of the whole being, of the soul and heart, not less than of the mind.

Passing to the greatest accomplishment of Longfellow's scholarly career, the translation of "The Divine Comedy," we find him for nearly twenty-four years in the maturity of his powers the companion of the stern Florentine. It is only after examining the notes and literary illustrations appended by him to his translation that we come to understand Longfellow's erudition. The translation itself shows in every line the simplest and greatest deference to his original author, and at the same time a resolute, worshipful entering into his meaning. What a scholar's paradise was that Wednesday evening symposium of the three friends, Professors Longfellow, Lowell, and Norton, held in the poet's study, to discuss Dante word by word!

Longfellow's use of the foreign suggestion is always happy, but nowhere more successful than in a poem which in its nature would seem to be born of his own contem

plation—namely, "The Old Clock on the Stairs." Without specific attention called to it the poet's indebtedness for the familiar refrain to Bridaine, the old French missionary, would never have been suspected by the reader.

3

BRIEF CRITICAL STUDY.

BY HARRIET L. MASON, A. M.,

Professor of English Literature, Drexel Institute, Philadelphia.

IN 1825 there was no American poet. Indeed, Washington Irving was the only prose writer who had made any European reputation. What wonder, then, that Longfellow, the young Bowdoin student, felt that there was room for an ambitious American man of letters? He felt that poetry, after the English style, of skylarks and nightingales, unknown to the natives, would not do. Yet he felt that before the new world could be worthily original she must saturate herself with the originality of the old. So to acquire the culture of Europe he went forth from his own land, impressionable, high-minded, pure in aspiration; and then returned after nearly six years' study, the first to bring the scholarship of Europe to the new world and make it live there. And, naturally enough, the earlier poems of Longfellow show this influence of scholarship in that they are translations from the German, the Spanish, the Danish, the Anglo-Saxon-or else, sad in tendency, owing to German mode of thought. But in his "Psalm of Life" bitter melancholy is left behind, and

the gladness of living well is the voice of hopeful, healthful young America. And this poem went straight to the hearts of the people. So, too, "Footsteps of Angels," touching upon sacred domestic chords, found quick

response.

He next turned to the ballad form, and no man knew better than he that this is one form of poetry in which popular taste is unerring. A good ballad is adopted by a nation, and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" caught the rough imagination of the people. In it there is strong motive, swift action, and imaginative diction—all to prove his birthright as a poet. And " The Skeleton in Armour," with its splendid lyric swing, held the vigour and fire, the metre itself, of the old Norse songs that the original discoverers of America must have often chanted. More than any other modern English author Longfellow reproduced the old-time magic and spirit of the folk-song. But his poems on slavery, which followed soon after, showed that, though carefully polished, they were treated with too much artistic coolness to be the powerful weapon for the cause which his friends had expected. It was the verse of Whittier and Lowell that helped the slave to freedom. Longfellow's temperament was not heroic, though his quickest sympathies were for good-and he lost an opportunity.

But Longfellow was profiting by the frank criticism. given him by Margaret Fuller in the Dial. She had called his poems exotic flowers with no smell of American soil about them, and in his poem "Evangeline" he aimed at an idyl that should have the colour and atmosphere of