acters in
"Sordello;" but I think it would suit me better, if you didn't mind, to
come up when the May races are on. I am not deeply concerned about the
minor characters in "Sordello," and have long reconciled myself to the
conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing
Sordello's story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however,
set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here
and there.

What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember,
and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books have made on
him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for example. I have not
read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, and what a
flood of memories his music brings with it! To me it is like a sad
autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing over the empty fields,
bringing the scents of October, the song of a belated bird, and here and
there a red leaf from the tree. There is that autumnal sense of things
fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not there, his poetry
stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of
one's boyhood; it breathes of a world very vaguely realized--a world of
imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps
Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which
comes with early manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his
battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a touch of
reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy's
favourites, such as "Of Nelson and the North," or "Ye Mariners of
England."

His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither
when one was fifteen. To read the "Voices of the Night," in
particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again, on a
Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with a
wide prospect of gardens and fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first
found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and
fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,

"The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!"

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem exquisite
still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow,
though you rather look to