himself. He liked
the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with, on their human
side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather
strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from our
environments. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he
was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can
come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of
the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was
Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to
one another. He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never
heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or
Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely
due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of
them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations
of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak.
No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and
sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar
pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice
Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it and inhaled
its wild new fragrance."

LVII

LONGFELLOW, THE UNIVERSAL POET

We have passed the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Longfellow,
and he still remains the favorite American poet. Not that Longfellow
is one of the great world poets; Longfellow himself would have been
offended with that eulogistic extravagance which would place him among
the few immortals. He is not a Homer, nor a Dante, nor a Shakspere.
No, he is not even a Wordsworth in philosophic insight into nature,
nor a Shelley in power to snatch the soul into the starry empyrean,
nor a Tennyson in variety and passion, nor a Milton in grandeur of
poetic expression. He is--only Longfellow. But that means he has his
own peculiar charm. It is idle to detract from the fame of one man
because he is not some one else. Roast beef may be more nutritious
than strawberries, but that is no criticism upon the flavor of the
strawberry. Longfellow is not Milton, but then neither is Milton
Longfellow:

If I cannot carry forests on my back
Neither can you crack a nut.

Of late years the critics have been finding fault with Longfellow.
They have said that really Longfellow is no poet. Frederic Harrison
calls Evangeline