IF the ability to express the best and most helpful thoughts that are common to humanity in all ages and countries, and to make this expression so lucid, so simple, so truthful, that those who most need to be helped by it are reached, influenced, and elevated—if to do this is the highest work of the poet, then Longfellow’s sphere of usefulness in poetry is higher and more nearly universal than that of any other poet who has written English verse during the nineteenth century. In what may be classed as the peculiar qualities of genius, he may not rank with Byron, with Shelley, or even with Tennyson or Swinburne in England, or with Poe and Lanier in America. But his usefulness is incomparably greater in America than that of any other poet of his century. He is peculiarly the poet of the home and the favorite of all those who prefer for themselves, or for those they wish to influence, an assured future of quiet usefulness rather than an uncertain and feverish life of that spasmodic admiration which the world bestows only on the extraordinary or the abnormal. The quiet stream which, beginning as a cold and pellucid brook flowing from the melting snows of some lofty mountain peak, gathers volume and increasing warmth in the lowlands until, without losing its native purity and clarity, it swells at last to a noble river, fertilizing wide areas of wood and field, of orchard and garden where grain and fruit and flowers in profusion and in beauty cheer the eye and delight the heart as a result of its fructifying influences—this is the type of the usefulness of Longfellow as a poet, as a benefactor of his own country, as a friend of universal humanity.

  That he was one of the greatest scholars of New England, as well as its greatest poet, is a fact which his own modesty left unasserted. But no one who attempts to follow him where his traces are obvious, through the literature of the classical, mediæval, and modern period, will doubt the extent of his industry or the thoroughness of his scholarship. As a prose writer he has an unpretentious and lucid style of direct statement which is always admirable in its spirit, and seldom at fault in its expression. His prose in the essays he has prefixed to “The Poets and Poetry of Europe,” in his “Hyperion,” and “Outre-Mer” ranks with the very best prose of its class written in America, and it is essentially superior both in idea and expression to the best work of the members of Longfellow’s own literary circle, who made prose writing much more a specialty that he ever attempted to do. If it were not that his use of German hexameter in his “Evangeline” is still under discussion, it might be said without danger of dispute that he did his best work in everything he attempted, and that he did even his worst work well. It is true when all is said that “Evangeline” is an admirable poem, worthy of its theme and of its author, though its mode is that of Voss rather than of Homer. When all has been admitted that can be truly said in depreciation of Longfellow, his work remains still unimpeached, to testify that there is no higher name in the American literature of the nineteenth century. He was born at Portland, Maine, February 27th, 1807. After graduating at Bowdoin College in 1825, he spent between two and three years in Europe, returning to become professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin (1829–1835). After a second visit to Europe he became professor of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres at Harvard, where he remained eighteen years, retiring in 1854 and continuing to reside at Cambridge, where he devoted himself to literature. His poems were widely circulated in England, and many of them have been translated into German and other continental languages. He died March 24th, 1882, after a life so placid that but for his deep sorrow at the loss of his wife it might have been redeemed wholly from that pathetic element which so frequently excites, if it does not occasion, poetic genius. The placidity of his life which re-appears in his verse has been the chief occasion for the charge of commonplaceness brought against him. But it is illogical to the last degree to confound the peaceful with the commonplace. The spirit of peace is as rare in poetry as it is in life, and it is Longfellow’s greatest glory that his work expresses it.