any
frosty night, to see how

"The white pavilions rose and fell
On the alarmed air;"

and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark "Three Brethren's
Cairn," that I half-hoped to watch when "the troubled army fled"--fled
with battered banners of mist drifting through the pines, down to the
Tweed and the sea. The "Skeleton in Armour" comes out once more as
terrific as ever, and the "Wreck of the Hesperus" touches one in the old,
simple way after so many, many days of verse-reading and even
verse-writing.

In brief, Longfellow's qualities are so mixed with what the reader
brings, with so many kindliest associations of memory, that one cannot
easily criticize him in cold blood. Even in spite of this friendliness
and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of course, that he does
moralize too much. The first part of his lyrics is always the best; the
part where he is dealing directly with his subject. Then comes the
"practical application" as preachers say, and I feel now that it is
sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured.

Look at his "Endymion." It is the earlier verses that win you:

"And silver white the river gleams
As if Diana in her dreams
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low."

That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But
the moral and consolatory _application_ is too long--too much dwelt on:

"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought."

Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and
not only does the poet "moralize his song," but the moral is feeble, and
fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of
persons now of whom it cannot be said that

"Some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own."

If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.

A poem like "My Lost Youth" is needed to remind one of what the author
really was, "simple, sensuous, passionate." What a lovely verse this is,
a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow's favourite Finnish
"Kalevala," "a verse of a Lapland song," like a wind over pines and salt
coasts:

"I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tide, tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea."

Thus Longfellow, though not a very gr