deathless name
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

The matchless lines in "The Two Angels," a poem that commemorates the
events of the birth of a child to Longfellow and the death of the
beautiful wife of Lowell on the same night, in which the poet sees an
angel with amaranths go to the door of his neighbor, while an angel
with asphodels comes to his own door, strikes the tenderest chords of
life.

Longfellow was the poet of friendship, and he carried his heart
friends wherever he went. The river Charles in his fancy made the
letter C in its windings in the Brighton meadows before his door, and
ever recalled three friends who had borne that name. One of the
masterpieces of the work of his fading years is "Three Friends of
Mine," in which he pictures Felton and Agassiz and the midnight
parting with Charles Sumner at his door, and represents himself as one
left to cover up the embers.

Henry W. Longfellow, the poet of "Hope, Home, and History," was a
descendant of the family of William Longfellow, who came from England
to Newbury, Mass., in 1675, and a son of Stephen Longfellow, an
eminent lawyer and public man. He was born in Portland, Me., February
27, 1807. The family consisted of eight children, of which he was the
second, and of which two were poets, the other being the Unitarian
hymn writer, Rev. Samuel Longfellow.

He grew up a pure, loving boy in the schools of Portland, Me., fond of
the woods, the hills, and the sea. "My Lost Youth" furnishes a
delightful picture of this period of his life. It is said that his
childhood fancy first found expression in the following rhymes:

"Mr. Finney had a turnip
That grew behind the barn,
And it grew and it grew,
But never did any _harm_."

A member of the Longfellow family has denied that these luminous but
not very promising lines were the first offering of his muse. If the
anecdote be apocryphal, the _boy_ Longfellow yet began to love poetry
and to write it, and he became a newspaper poet, one of those common
soldiers of literature, while a student. He read Irving at twelve, and
was charmed with the matter and style of "Rip Van Winkle." He felt the
charm of Horace a little later, and probably learned his first lesson
in eloquent literature from the "Poetic Art" of the Augustine age of
Rome in her glory. Says Horace: "He who writes what is useful with
what is agreeable wins every vote: his book crosses the sea; it will
enrich the booksel