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Having briefly mentioned one circumstance which is retarding us in the way of our literary prosperity, I shall now mention one from which we may hope a happy and glorious issue: It is the influence of natural scenery in forming the poetical character. Genius, to be sure, must be born with a man; and it is its high prerogative to be free, limitless, irrepressible. Yet how is it moulded by the plastic hand of Nature! how are its attributes shaped and modulated, when a genius like Canova's failed in the bust of the Corsican, and amid the splendor of the French metropolis languished for the sunny skies and vine-clad hills of Italy? Men may talk of sitting down in the calm and quiet of their libraries, and of forgetting, in the eloquent companionship of books, all the vain cares that beset them in the crowded thoroughfares of life; but, after all, there is nothing which so frees us from the turbulent ambition and bustle of the world, nothing which so fills the mind with great and glowing conceptions, and at the same time so warms the heart with love and tenderness, as a frequent and close communion with natural scenery. The scenery of our own country, too, so rich as it is in everything beautiful and magnificent, and so full of quiet loveliness or of sublime and solitary awe, has for our eyes enchantment, for our ears an impressive and unutterable eloquence. Its language is in high mountains, and in the pleasant valleys scooped out between them, in the garniture which the fields put on, and in the blue lake asleep in the hollow of the hills. There is an inspiration, too, in the rich sky that "brightens and purples" o'er our earth, when lighted up with the splendor of morning, or when the garment of the clouds comes over the setting sun.

Our poetry is not in books alone. It is in the hearts of those men, whose love for the world's gain,--for its business and its holiday,--has grown cold within them, and who have gone into the retirements of Nature, and have found there that sweet sentiment and pure devotion of feeling can spring up and live in the shadow of a low and quiet life, and amid those that have no splendor in their joys, and no parade in their griefs.

Thus shall the mind take color from things around us,--from them shall there be a genuine birth of enthusiasm,--a rich development of poetic feeling, that shall break forth in song. Though the works of art must grow old and perish away from earth, the forms of nature shall keep forever their power over the human mind, and have their influence upon the literature of a people.

We may rejoice, then, in the hope of beauty and sublimity in our national literature, for no people are richer than we are in the treasures of nature. And well may each of us feel a glorious and high-minded pride in saying, as he looks on the hills and vales,--on the woods and waters of New England,--

"This is my own, my native land."

LITERATURE AS A PURSUIT

Longfellow graduated at Bowdoin College in June, 1825. There was in his mind, apparently, from the first, that definiteness of purpose which is so often wanting when a student takes his first college degree. There was for him no doubt or hesitation: it must be literature or nothing; and this not merely from a preference for the pursuit, but from an ambition, willingly acknowledged, to make a name in that direction. He writes to his friend, George W. Wells, "Somehow, and yet I hardly know why, I am unwilling to study any profession. I cannot make a lawyer of any eminence, because I have not a talent for argument; I am not good enough for a minister,--and as to physic, I utterly and absolutely detest it." Even a year before this, he had written to his father a letter of some moment, dated March 13, 1824, containing the following ominous passage: "I am curious to know what you do intend to make of me,--whether I am to study a profession or not; and if so, what profession. I hope your ideas upon this subject will agree with mine, for I have a particular and strong prejudice for one course of life, to which you, I fear, will not agree. It will not be worth while for me to mention what this is until I become more acquainted with your own wishes."

This letter remaining for some months unanswered, there followed another which at last stated his own personal desire. It was written to his father and dated December 5, 1824.

"I take this early opportunity to write to you, because I wish to know fully your inclination with regard to the profession I am to pursue when I leave college.

"Whether Nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief, I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of law."

Again on December 31 he writes to his father, by way of New Year's gift, "Let me reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres, and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I could make in the literary world. If I fail here, there is still time enough left for the study of a profession; and while residing at Cambridge, I shall have acquired the knowledge of some foreign languages which will be, through life, of the greatest utility."

The answer of the father is too characteristic to be omitted, whether for its views as to personal standards or as to poetic structure. Most youthful poets of that day had to face a critical method based strictly upon the versification of Pope, and their parents regarded all more flowing measures as having a slight flavor of the French Revolution.

On January 24, 1825, the son wrote to his father again:--

"I purchased last evening a beautiful pocket edition of Sir William Jones's Letters, and have just finished reading them. Eight languages he was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary; and there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. I have somewhere seen or heard the observation that as many languages as a person acquires, so many times is he a man."

It was undoubtedly an important fact to the young poet to be brought thus early in contact with Sir William Jones and his twenty-eight languages. It is the experience of all that the gift of learning a variety of tongues is something which peculiarly belongs to youth. In Southern Europe, in Russia, in the East, it is a common thing to encounter mere children who with next to no schooling will prattle readily in three or four languages with equal inaccuracy but with equal ease; while a much older person may acquire them by laborious study and yet never feel at home. One can hardly doubt Longfellow's natural readiness in that direction; he was always being complimented, at any rate--though this may not count for much--upon his aptness in pronouncing foreign tongues, and the ease with which his own compositions lent themselves to translation may very possibly have some obscure connection with his own gifts in this respect. His college training can have had little bearing upon it, since there is no evidence that his classmate Hawthorne, doubtless a man of higher genius, showed any such capacity.

FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE

Longfellow's college class numbered thirty-seven, and his rank in it at graduation was nominally fourth--though actually third, through the sudden death of a classmate just before Commencement. Soon after his graduation, an opportunity occurred to establish a professorship of modern languages in the college upon a fund given by Mrs. Bowdoin; and he, being then scarcely nineteen, and nominally a law student in his father's office, was sent to Europe to prepare himself for this chair, apparently on an allowance of six hundred dollars a year. The college tradition is that this appointment--which undoubtedly determined the literary tendencies of his whole life--was given to him in consequence of the impression made upon an examining committee by the manner in which he had translated one of Horace's odes. He accordingly sailed from New York for Europe on May 15, 1826, having stopped at Boston on the way, where he dined with Professor George Ticknor, then holding the professorship at Harvard College to which Longfellow was destined to succeed at a later day. Professor Ticknor had himself recently returned from a German university, and urged the young man to begin his studies there, giving him letters of introduction to Professor Eichhorn, to Robert Southey, and to Washington Irving, then in Europe.

He sailed on the ship Cadmus, Captain Allen, and wrote to his mother from Havre that his passage of thirty days had been a dreary blank, and that the voyage was very tiresome because of the continual talking of French and broken English, adding, "For Frenchmen, you know, talk incessantly, and we had at least a dozen of them with us." In spite of this rather fatiguing opportunity, he was not at once at home in French, but wrote ere long, "I am coming on famously, I assure you." He wrote from Auteuil, where he soon went, "Attached to the house is an extensive garden, full of fruit-trees, and bowers, and alcoves, where the boarders ramble and talk from morning till night. This makes the situation an excellent one for me; I can at any time hear French conversation,--for the French are always talking. Besides, the conversation is the purest of French, inasmuch as persons from the highest circles in Paris are residing here,--amongst others, an old gentleman who was of the household of Louis the Sixteenth, and a Madame de Sailly, daughter of a celebrated advocate named Berryer, who was the defender of Marshal Ney in his impeachment for treason. There is also a young student of law here, who is my almost constant companion, and who corrects all my mistakes in speaking or writing the French. As he is not much older than I am, I do not feel so much embarrassed in speaking to him as I do in speaking to others. These are some of the advantages which I enjoy here, and you can easily imagine others which a country residence offers over that of a city, during the vacation of the literary institutions at Paris and the cessation of their lectures."

It is to be noticed from the outset that the French villages disappointed him as they disappoint many others. In his letters he recalls "how fresh and cheerful and breezy a New England village is; how marked its features--so different from the town, so peculiar, so delightful." He finds a French village, on the other hand, to be like a deserted town, having "the same paved streets, the same dark, narrow alleys without sidewalks, the same dingy stone houses, each peeping into its neighbor's windows, the same eternal stone walls, shutting in from the eye of the stranger all the beauty of the place and opposing an inhospitable barrier to the lover of natural scenery." But when he finds himself among rural scenes, he has the delight felt by many an American boy since his days, as in the picture following:--

Thus, wherever he goes, his natural good spirits prevail over everything. Washington Irving, in his diary, speaks of Longfellow at Madrid as having "arrived safely and cheerily, having met with no robbers." Mrs. Alexander Everett, wife of the American minister at Madrid, writes back to America, "His countenance is itself a letter of recommendation." He went into good Spanish society and also danced in the streets on village holidays. At the Alhambra, he saw the refinement of beauty within the halls, and the clusters of gypsy caves in the hillside opposite. After eight months of Spain he went on to Italy, where he remained until December, and passed to Germany with the new year. He sums up his knowledge of the languages at this point by saying, "With the French and Spanish languages I am familiarly conversant so as to speak them correctly and write them with as much ease and fluency as I do the English. The Portuguese I read without difficulty. And with regard to my proficiency in the Italian, I have only to say that all at the hotel where I lodge took me for an Italian, until I told them I was an American." He settled down to his studies in Germany, his father having written, with foresight then unusual, "I consider the German language and literature much more important than the Italian." He did not, however, have any sense of actual transplantation, as is the case with some young students, for although he writes to his sister , "My poetic career is finished. Since I left America I have hardly put two lines together," yet he sends to Carey & Lea, the Philadelphia publishers, to propose a series of sketches and tales of New England life. These sketches, as given in his note-book, are as follows:--

"1. New England Scenery: description of Sebago Pond; rafting logs; tavern scene; a tale connected with the 'Images.'

"2. A New England Village: country squire; the parson; the little deacon; the farm-house kitchen.

"3. Husking Frolic: song and tales; fellow who plays the fife for the dance; tale of the Quoddy Indians; description of Sacobezon, their chief.

"5. Thanksgiving Day: its merry-making, and tales .

"7. Description of the White Mountains: tale of the Bloody Hand.

"10. Reception of Lafayette in a country village.

"13. Down East: the missionary of Acadie."

A few days after, he wrote from G?ttingen to his father, "I shall never again be in Europe." We thus see his mind at work on American themes in Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet's homeward-looking thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow's work appeared before he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret Fuller said of him, "He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows." Criticising the very prelude to "Voices of the Night," she pointed out the phrases "pentecost" and "bishop's-caps" as indications that he was not merely "musing upon many things," but on many books which described them. But the habit steadily diminished. His very gift at translation, in which he probably exceeded on the whole any other modern poet, led him, nevertheless, always to reproduce old forms rather than create new ones, thus aiding immensely his popularity with the mass of simple readers, while coming short of the full demands of the more critical. To construct his most difficult poems was thus mainly a serene pleasure, and something as far as possible from that conflict which kept Hawthorne all winter, by his wife's testimony, with "a knot in his forehead" while he was writing "The Scarlet Letter."

It is always to be borne in mind that, as Mr. Scudder has pointed out in his admirable paper on "Longfellow and his Art," the young poet was really preparing himself in Europe for his literary work as well as for his professional work, and half consciously. This is singularly confirmed by his lifelong friend, Professor George W. Greene, who, in dedicating his "The Life of Nathanael Greene" to his friend, thus recalls an evening spent together at Naples in 1828:--

"We wanted," he says, "to be alone, and yet to feel that there was life all around us. We went up to the flat roof of the house where, as we walked, we could look down into the crowded street, and out upon the wonderful bay, and across the bay to Ischia and Capri and Sorrento, and over the house-tops and villas and vineyards to Vesuvius. The ominous pillar of smoke hung suspended above the fatal mountain, reminding us of Pliny, its first and noblest victim. A golden vapor crowned the bold promontory of Sorrento, and we thought of Tasso. Capri was calmly sleeping, like a sea-bird upon the waters; and we seemed to hear the voice of Tacitus from across the gulf of eighteen centuries, telling us that the historian's pen is still powerful to absolve or to condemn long after the imperial sceptre has fallen from the withered hand. There, too, lay the native island of him whose daring mind conceived the fearful vengeance of the Sicilian Vespers. We did not yet know Niccolini; but his grand verses had already begun their work of regeneration in the Italian heart. Virgil's tomb was not far off. The spot consecrated by Sannazaro's ashes was near us. And over all, with a thrill like that of solemn music, fell the splendor of the Italian sunset."

As an illustration of this obvious fact that Longfellow, during this first European visit, while nominally training himself for purely educational work, was fitting himself also for a literary career, we find from his letter to his father, May 15, 1829, that while hearing lectures in German and studying faithfully that language, he was, as he says, "writing a book, a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain, and Italy." We shall presently encounter this book under the name of "Outre-Mer." He connects his two aims by saying in the same letter, "One must write and write correctly, in order to teach." Again he adds, "The further I advance, the more I see to be done. The more, too, I am persuaded of the charlatanism of literary men. For the rest, my fervent wish is to return home." His brother tells us that among his note-books of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to the children of Cambridge, in 1880: "Thus the ideas as well as the children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away." He also included a quotation from John Lyly's "Endymion," which ten years later furnished the opening of his own "Hyperion." "Dost thou know what a poet is? Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say--a poet." When we consider what he had just before written to his sister, it only furnishes another illustration of the fact, which needs no demonstration, that young authors do not always know themselves.

He reached home from Europe, after three years of absence, on August 11, 1829, looking toward Bowdoin College as his abode, and a professorship of modern languages as his future position. Up to this time, to be sure, the economical college had offered him only an instructorship. But he had shown at this point that quiet decision and firmness which marked him in all practical affairs, and which was not always quite approved by his more anxious father. In this case he carried his point, and he received on the 6th of September this simple record of proceedings from the college:--

"In the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College, Sept. 1st, 1829: Mr. Henry W. Longfellow having declined to accept the office of instructor in modern languages.

"Voted, that we now proceed to the choice of a professor of modern languages.

"And Mr. H. W. Longfellow was chosen."

Thus briefly was the matter settled, and he was launched upon his life's career at the age of twenty-two. Of those who made up his circle of friends in later years, Holmes had just graduated from Harvard, Sumner was a Senior there, and Lowell was a schoolboy in Cambridge. Few American colleges had at that time special professors of modern languages, though George Ticknor had set a standard for them all. Longfellow had to prepare his own text-books--to translate "L'Homond's Grammar," to edit an excellent little volume of French "Proverbes Dramatiques," and a small Spanish Reader, "Novelas Espa?olas." He was also enlisted in a few matters outside, and drew up the outline of a prospectus for a girls' high school in Portland, such high schools being then almost as rare as professorships of modern languages. He was also librarian. He gave a course of lectures on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but there seems to have been no reference to German, which had not then come forward into the place in American education which it now occupies. As to literature, he wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, "Since my return I have written one piece of poetry, but have not published a line. You need not be alarmed on that score. I am all prudence now, since I can form a more accurate judgment of the merit of poetry. If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first." It was actually nine years. For the "North American Review" he wrote in April, 1831, an essay on "The Origin and Progress of the French Language." He afterwards sent similar papers to the same periodical upon the Italian and Spanish languages and literatures, each of these containing also original translations. Thus he entered on his career as a teacher, but another change in life also awaited him.

MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRUNSWICK

It has been a source of regret to many that the memoirs of Longfellow, even when prepared by his brother, have given, perhaps necessarily, so little space to his early love and first marriage, facts which are apt to be, for a poet, the turning-points in his career. We know that this period in Lowell's life, for instance, brought what seemed almost a transformation of his nature, making an earnest reformer and patriot of a youth who had hitherto been little more than a brilliant and somewhat reckless boy. In Longfellow's serener nature there was no room for a change so marked, yet it is important to recognize that it brought with it a revival of that poetic tendency which had singularly subsided for a time after its early manifestation. He had written to his friend, George W. Greene, on June 27, 1830, that he had long ceased to attach any value to his early poems or even to think of them at all. Yet after about a year of married life, he began the introduction to his Phi Beta Kappa poem, and during the following year published a volume of poetical translations from the Spanish; thus imitating Bryant, then in some ways his model, who had derived so much of his inspiration from the Spanish muse. It is not unreasonable to recognize something of his young wife's influence in this rekindling of poetic impulse, and it is pleasant, in examining the manuscript lectures delivered by him at Bowdoin College and still preserved there, to find them accompanied by pages of extracts, here and there, in her handwriting. It will therefore be interesting to make her acquaintance a little farther.

Mary Storer Potter was the second daughter of the Hon. Barrett Potter and Anne Potter of Portland, neighbors and friends of the Longfellow family. She had been for a time a schoolmate of Henry Longfellow at the private school of Bezaleel Cushman in Portland; and it is the family tradition that on the young professor's returning to his native city after his three years' absence in Europe he saw her at church and was so struck with her appearance as to follow her home afterwards without venturing to accost her. On reaching his own house, however, he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel. They were married September 14, 1831, she being then nineteen years of age, having been born on May 12, 1812, and he being twenty-four.

It was a period when Portland was somewhat celebrated for the beauty of its women; and indeed feminine beauty, at least in regard to coloring, seems somewhat developed, like the tints of garden flowers, by the neighborhood of the sea. An oil painting of Mrs. Longfellow is in my possession, taken in a costume said to have been selected by the young poet from one of the highly illustrated annuals so much in vogue at that day. She had dark hair and deep blue eyes, the latter still represented in some of her nieces, although she left no children. Something of her love of study and of her qualities of mind and heart are also thus represented in this younger generation. She had never learned Latin or Greek, her father disapproving of those studies for girls, but he had encouraged her in the love of mathematics, and there is among her papers a calculation of an eclipse.

She had been mainly educated at the school, then celebrated, of Miss Gushing in Hingham. "My first impression of her," wrote in later years the venerable professor, Alpheus Packard,--who was professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin at the time of her marriage,--"is of an attractive person, blooming in health and beauty, the graceful bride of a very attractive and elegant young man." Some books from her girlish library now lie before me, dingy and time-worn, with her name in varying handwriting from the early "Mary S. Potter" to the later "Mary S. P. Longfellow." They show many marked passages and here and there a quotation. The collection begins with Miss Edgeworth's "Harry and Lucy;" then follow somewhat abruptly "Sabbath Recreations," by Miss Emily Taylor, and "The Wreath, a selection of elegant poems from the best authors,"--these poems including the classics of that day, Beattie's "Minstrel," Blair's "Grave," Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Traveller," and some lighter measures from Campbell, Moore, and Burns. The sombre muse undoubtedly predominated, but on the whole the book was not so bad an elementary preparation for the training of a poet's wife. It is a touching accidental coincidence that one of the poems most emphatically marked is one of the few American poems in these volumes, Bryant's "Death of the Flowers," especially the last verse, which describes a woman who died in her youthful beauty. To these are added books of maturer counsel, as Miss Bowdler's "Poems and Essays," then reprinted from the sixteenth English edition, but now forgotten, and Mrs. Barbauld's "Legacy for Young Ladies," discussing beauty, fashion, botany, the uses of history, and especially including a somewhat elaborate essay on "female studies," on which, perhaps, Judge Potter founded his prohibition of the classics. Mrs. Barbauld lays down the rule that "the learned languages, the Greek especially, require a great deal more time than a young woman can conveniently spare. To the Latin," she adds, "there is not an equal objection ... and it will not," she thinks, "in the present state of things, excite either a smile or a stare in fashionable company." But she afterwards says, "French you are not only permitted to learn, but you are laid under the same necessity of acquiring it as your brother is of acquiring the Latin." Mrs. Barbauld's demands, however, are not extravagant, as she thinks that "a young person who reads French with ease, who is so well grounded as to write it grammatically, and has what I should call a good English pronunciation will by a short residence in France gain fluency and the accent." This "good English pronunciation" of French is still not unfamiliar to those acquainted with Anglicized or Americanized regions of Paris.

Among the maturer books of Mary Potter was Worcester's "Elements of History," then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a little book called "The Literary Gem" , which was an excellent companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be known, Goethe, Richter, and K?rner, together with examples of that American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the German, and of which the "Legend of Peter Rugg," by William Austin, is the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry, and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature. It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as "a lovely woman in character and appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner that won all hearts."

Longfellow's salary at Bowdoin College was eight hundred dollars, as professor of modern languages, with an additional hundred as librarian. From the beginning he took the lead among American teachers in this department, the difficulty among these being that they consisted of two classes,--Americans imperfectly acquainted with Europe and foreigners as imperfectly known in America. Even in the selection of mere tutors the same trouble always existed, though partially diminished, as time went on, by those refugees from revolutionary excitements in Europe, especially from Germany and Italy, who were a real addition to our university circles. Even these were from their very conditions of arrival a somewhat impetuous and unmanageable class, and in American colleges--as later during the Civil War in the American army--the very circumstances of their training made them sometimes hard to control as subordinates. It was very fortunate, when they found, as in Longfellow, a well-trained American who could be placed over their heads.

There were also text-books and readers to be prepared and edited by the young professor, one of which, as I well remember, was of immense value to students, the "Proverbes Dramatiques," already mentioned, a collection of simple and readable plays, written in colloquial French, and a most valuable substitute for the previous Racine and Corneille, the use of which was like teaching classes to read out of Shakespeare. Thus full of simple and congenial work, Longfellow went to housekeeping with his young wife in a house still attractive under its rural elms, and thus described by him:--

"June 23 . I can almost fancy myself in Spain, the morning is so soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild brier and the mock orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun."

THE CORNER STONE LAID

That the young professor rose very early for literary work, even in November, we know by his own letters, and we also know that he then as always took this work very seriously and earnestly. What his favorite employment was, we learn by a letter to his friend George W. Greene about a book which he proposes to publish in parts, and concerning which he adds, "I find that it requires little courage to publish grammars and school-books; but in the department of fine writing--or attempts at fine writing--it requires vastly more." As a matter of fact, he had already published preliminary sketches of "Outre-Mer" in the "New England Magazine," a Boston periodical just undertaken, putting them under the rather inappropriate title of "The Schoolmaster," the first appearing in the number for July 18, 1831, and the sixth and last in the number for February, 1833. He writes to his sister , "I hereby send you a magazine for your amusement. I wrote 'The Schoolmaster' and the translation from Luis de Gongora." It is worth mentioning that he adds, "Read 'The Late Joseph Natterstrom.' It is good." This was a story by William Austin, whose "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," has just been mentioned as an early landmark of the period. It is fair to say, however, that the critic of to-day can hardly see in these youthful pages any promise of the Longfellow of the future. The opening chapter, describing the author as a country schoolmaster, who plays with his boys in the afternoon, is only a bit of Irving diluted,--the later papers, "A Walk in Normandy," "The Village of Auteuil," etc., carrying the thing somewhat farther, but always in the same rather thin vein. Their quality of crudeness was altogether characteristic of the period, and although Holmes and Whittier tried their 'prentice hands with the best intentions in the same number of the "New England Magazine," they could not raise its level. We see in these compositions, as in the "Annuals" of that day, that although Hawthorne had begun with his style already formed, yet that of Longfellow was still immature. This remark does not, indeed, apply to a version of a French drinking song, which exhibits something of his later knack at such renderings. There was at any rate some distinct maturity in the first number of "Outre-Mer," which appeared in 1835. A notice of this book in the London "Spectator" closed with this expression of judgment: "Either the author of the 'Sketch Book' has received a warning, or there are two Richmonds in the field."

Literary history hardly affords a better instance of the direct following of a model by a younger author than one can inspect by laying side by side a page of the first number of "Outre-Mer" and a page of the "Sketch Book," taking in each case the first American editions. Irving's books were printed by C. S. Van Winkle, New York, and Longfellow's by J. Griffin, Brunswick, Maine; the latter bearing the imprint of Hilliard, Gray & Co., Boston, and the former of the printer only. Yet the physical appearance of the two sets of books is almost identical; the typography, distribution into chapters, the interleaved titles of these chapters, and the prefix to each chapter of a little motto, often in a foreign language. It must be remembered that the "Sketch Book," like "Outre-Mer," was originally published in numbers; and besides all this the literary style of Longfellow's work was at this time so much like that of Irving that it is very hard at first to convince the eye that Irving is not responsible for all. Yet for some reason or other the early copies of the "Sketch Book" command no high price at auction, while at the recent sale of Mr. Arnold's collection in New York the two parts of "Outre-Mer" brought 0. The work is now so rare that the library of Harvard University has no copy of the second part, and only an imperfect copy of the first with several pages mutilated, but originally presented to Professor Felton by the author and bearing his autograph. As to style, it is unquestionable that in "Outre-Mer" we find Washington Irving frankly reproduced, while in "Hyperion" we are soon to see the development of a new literary ambition and of a more imaginative touch.

The early notices of "Outre-Mer" are written in real or assumed ignorance of the author's name and almost always with some reference to Irving. Thus there is a paper in the "North American Review" for October, 1834, by the Rev. O. W. B. Peabody, who says of the book that it is "obviously the production of a writer of talent and of cultivated taste, who has chosen to give to the public the results of his observation in foreign countries in the form of a series of tales and sketches." He continues, "It is a form which, as every reader knows, had been recommended by the high example and success of Mr. Irving.... It is not to be supposed that in adopting the form of Mr. Irving, the author has been guilty of any other imitation." This may in some sense be true, and yet it is impossible to compare the two books without seeing that kind of assimilation which is only made more thorough by being unconscious. Longfellow, even thus early, brought out more picturesquely and vividly than Irving the charm exerted by the continent of Europe over the few Americans who were exploring it. What Irving did in this respect for England, Longfellow did for the continental nations. None of the first German students from America, Ticknor, Cogswell, Everett, or Bancroft, had been of imaginative temperament, and although their letters, as since printed, revealed Germany to America as the land of learning, it yet remained for Longfellow to portray all Europe from the point of view of the pilgrim. When he went to England in 1835, as we shall see, he carried with him for English publication the two volumes of one of the earliest literary tributes paid by the New World to the Old, "Outre-Mer."

In the second volume of "The Token" the puzzle is yet greater, for though there are half a dozen stories without initials, or other clue to authorship, yet not one of them suggests Longfellow at all, or affords the slightest clue by which it can be connected with him, while on the other hand there is a poem occupying three pages and signed H. W. L., called "An Evening in Autumn." This was never included by him among his works, nor does it appear in the list of his juvenile poems and translations in the Appendix to Mr. Scudder's edition of his "Complete Poetical Works," yet the initials leave hardly a doubt that it was written by him. Why, then, was it not mentioned in this list sent to Mr. George W. Greene, or did he by a slip of the pen record it as a story and not as a poem? Perhaps no solution of this conundrum will ever be given, but it would form a valuable contribution to the record of his literary dawning. Judging from the evidence now given, the most probable hypothesis would seem to be that the two contributions which Longfellow meant to enumerate were the story called "An Indian Summer" in "The Token" for 1832, and a poem, not a story, in "The Token" for 1833. Even against this theory there is the objection to be made that the editor of "The Token," Samuel G. Goodrich, in his "Recollections of a Lifetime" , after mentioning Longfellow casually, at the very end of his list of writers, says of him, "It is a curious fact that the latter, Longfellow, wrote prose, and at that period had shown neither a strong bias nor a particular talent for poetry." It is farther noticeable that in his index to this book, Mr. Goodrich does not find room for Longfellow's name at all.

It is to be borne in mind that at the very time when Longfellow was writing these somewhat trivial contributions for "The Token," he was also engaged on an extended article for "The North American Review," which was a great advance upon all that he had before published. His previous papers had all been scholarly, but essentially academic. They had all lain in the same general direction with Ticknor's "History of Spanish Literature," and had shared its dryness. But when he wrote, at twenty-four, an article for "The North American Review" of January, 1832, called "The Defence of Poetry," taking for his theme Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy," just then republished in the "Library of the Old English Prose Writers," at Cambridge, Mass., it was in a manner a prediction of Emerson's oration, "The American Scholar," five years later. So truly stated were his premises that they are still valid and most important for consideration to-day, after seventy years have passed. It is thus that his appeal begins:--

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