eat magician and master of
language--not a Keats by any means--has often, by sheer force of plain
sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with
music that haunts us and will not be forgotten:

"Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows,
And the brooks of morning run."

There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli's, the Virgin seated with the
Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise.
This poem of Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour," seems, like
Botticelli's painting, to open a door into the paradise of children,
where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden from men--what no
man hath seen at any time.

Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who, with all his science of
verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of it into his
lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the other is the poet
of Death, and of _bizarre_ shapes of death, from which Heaven deliver us!

Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American, though
Longfellow, in "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha," and the "New England
Tragedies," sought his topics in the history and traditions of the New
World.

To me "Hiawatha" seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is quite
full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds, weather, and
wind and snow. Everything lives with a human breath, as everything
should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk, to whom all the
world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of course there are
lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us in the lay of the
mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told
that

"the gentle Chibiabos
_Sang in tones of deep emotion_!"

"Tones of deep emotion" may pass in a novel, but not in this epic of the
wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy record of
those dim, mournful races which have left no story of their own, only
here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest leaves.

A poet's life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he knew
as little of Burn's as of Shakespeare's? Of Longfellow's there is
nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it--his poetry, the
voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever bore. I think
there are not many things in poets' lives more touching than his silence,
in ver