night scene and the spirit of self-renunciation. It is one of the most
beautiful songs of the age as set to music by two English composers. We
never tire of the message of sympathy.

"Excelsior," which has been greatly parodied, expresses in a simple
way what Browning has more artistically illustrated in "Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came." It was written one evening after the poet had
received a letter from his beloved friend, Charles Sumner, full of
lofty sentiments, expressed in the classic rhetoric of the time. As he
dropped the letter the word "Excelsior" caught his eye, and the
inspiration and the vision of the poem came. He wrote it on the back
of the letter which contained the magic word.

It is said that the words "Cumnor Hall," in Meckle's ballad, so
haunted the mind of Sir Walter Scott as to compel him to write
"Kenilworth." "I was led, I think," said Longfellow, "to write the
'Wreck of the Hesperus' by the words 'Norman's Woe' I had been reading
one dreary night of the disasters that had befallen the Gloucester
fishing fleet, and my eye met the words 'Norman's Woe.' I went to bed,
but the story haunted me. I arose and began to write, and the poem
came to me in whole stanzas."

"The Old Clock on the Stairs" was suggested by an old farmhouse
timepiece at the country house of Mr. Appleton, his father-in-law.
While the house described was in the country, the description answers
well to the poet's own residence, which also contained an eight-day
clock which reached from floor to ceiling. Many people never so much
as doubted that the Cragie House and its clock were meant in the poem.
The clock in the Cambridge house was so old and antique that most
visitors fancied that they saw in it the real "old clock on the
stairs." The refrain was suggested by the French words "Toujours
jamais, jamais toujours" in an elegant French quotation.

"Hiawatha" was pictured to the poet by the story which Abraham le
Fort, an Onondaga chief, gave to Schoolcraft. The musical vocabulary
in which the Indian words suggest their own meaning may be found in
Schoolcraft. It is the one poem which commemorates the legends of the
Indian races; it will doubtless outlive those races, and be their
tradition in future ages. The Indian words, as in the instance of
"Norman's Woe," must have suggested in many cases the scenes and
incidents of the poet's creative fancy.

"The March of Miles Standish," which followed, repeats the old
apocryphal