"goody, goody dribble!" and Quiller-Couch in his
anthology gives three pages to Longfellow and seven to Wilfred Scawen
Blunt--but who is Blunt? When I was in Berlin I found in a German
history of English and American Literature one-half a page devoted to
Longfellow and ten pages to Poe. Perhaps some of this criticism is but
the natural reaction following the extreme praise that ensued after
the death of Longfellow in 1882.

[Illustration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
From a wood engraving of a life photograph]

But Longfellow is surviving all derogatory criticism. He is still the
poet with the universal appeal. It is altogether probable that he is
more widely read to-day than any other American poet. Even foreigners
still express their affection for this poet of the domestic
affections. In 1907 Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the English Ambassador
to the United States, made an address in which he made graceful
acknowledgement of his debt to this American poet:

"I owe much of the pleasure of my life to American writers of every
shade of thought.... But I owe to one American writer much more than
pleasure. Tastes differ and fashions change, and I am told that the
poetry of Longfellow is not read as it used to be. Men in my own
country have asked me whether the rivers of Damascus were not better
than all the waters of Israel, whether Shakspere, and Milton, and
Shelley, and Keats were not enough for me, that I need go to
Longfellow. And Americans have seemed surprised that I did not speak
rather of Lowell and Bryant and others. Far be it from me to say a
word against any of them. I have loved them all from my youth up,
every one of them in his own way, and Shakspere as the master and
compendium of them all. No one, I suppose, would place Longfellow as a
poet quite on the same level with some of them. But the fact remains
that, for one reason or another, perhaps in part from early
associations, Longfellow has always spoken to my heart. Many a time,
in lands far away from the land he loved so well, I have sought for
sympathy in happiness and in sorrow--

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of time--

but from that pure and gentle and untroubled spirit."

Professor E.A. Grosvenor, of Amherst, years ago published an article
on Longfellow that was widely copied. It is an interesting account of
a conversation in 1879 on board