more completely. From his earliest manhood he knew what he wished to be and to do. His aims were of the highest and the worthiest, and they implied the discipline of a pure life and an unselfish heart. This discipline he maintained to the end; so that what perhaps at first had been only a consciously adopted rule of conduct became at last of the very essence of his being. Certainly the fire of poetic genius never animated a more unselfish heart or glowed in a purer life than his.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. His father was Stephen Longfellow, a lawyer of that town, an eminently good and lovable man-successful, well thought of, and well to do, and descended from a long line of Longfellow ancestors that had steadily risen in prosperity and influence from the time that William Longfellow of Hampshire, England, in the reign of Charles II., had first set foot on New England soil. His mother was Zilpah Wadsworth, a beautiful woman-kind, charitable, and sympathetica lover of nature, a lover of the Bible, and a lover especially of the poetry of the Bible. Her father was Peleg Wadsworth, who had fought and got wounds and honour on revolutionary battlefields, and had risen thereby to the rank of general. Remoter and more celebrated ancestors on the mother's side were the John Alden and Priscilla of "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Thus Longfellow, like Bryant, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, came of the choicest New England stock. History will account it of the chiefest glories of New England that these seven men, who are, indeed, the

seven lamps of light in American literature, should all, in parentage and in lineage, have been indigenous to her soil.

Longfellow, like Tennyson, was a poet from his earliest youth. From his earliest youth, also, he was indifferent to the sports and enjoyments usually affected by youths and young men. He was fond of no exercise save walking. His elder brother, who had a young man's usual passion for a gun, once persuaded him to shoot at a robin. He killed the bird, but he never pulled a trigger again. He enjoyed music, and he enjoyed poetry. But he especially enjoyed such prose imaginative works as "The Arabian Nights," "Don Quixote," and Irving's "Sketch Book." "The Sketch Book was, indeed, his favourite book of all.

Years afterward he wrote: I was a schoolboy when it was published; and I read each succeeding number with ever-increasing wonder and delight, spellbound by its pleasant humour, its melancholy, and its atmosphere of reverie." When he came to write prose himself, it was found that his own style had been modelled upon that of Irving. But Longfellow's youth was most remarkable for the depth and strength, the vividness and definiteness, of the impressions of nature which he then received. In after years he was too much of a student, too much of a house recluse, to keep up any familiarity with nature direct. Even the beautiful natural imagery of "Evangeline" was written from recollections of rural scenes that once had being near his youthful home. Even the wilder and more striking imagery of " Hiawatha" was but the memory of impressions received in early rambles