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Take, for example, "The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair, The best-beloved Night!" Is not that version of Euripides exquisite does it not seem exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human matter than for an indefinable beauty of manner?
Longfellow was equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put him aboard.
But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting.
“Nothing can surpass the respect paid to Longfellow here, from the Queen downward. He is everywhere received and courted, and finds the working men at least as well acquainted with his books as the classes socially above them.”
Poe, for example, is not of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company. In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of vision, Longfellow in craftsmanship, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of emotion and of phrase.
Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary group, led by Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but Mr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian. Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence, especially in medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science. He stood alone. He had no master hardly even his father.
I don't regard the last few hours as altogether wasted. After this the Princess and I did not talk much: there seemed to be no need of it. But she was a new and revised edition of the old Clarice, wonderfully sweet, and gracious, and equable; and her look when we met was like the benediction in answer to prayer, as Longfellow says.
But Emerson was not cold or disposed to make mere subjects of analysis of his friends, as Longfellow thought; he was an eager student of men as of nature, but superficial men he tired of and dropped, nothing being to be learned from them, though where he found what he looked for in a character he never tired of it.
One of the books that lay on my table was a copy of Byron; though most of the others were the works of American authors Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, Poe, and one or two others. He had picked up my Byron, and glancing at it had remarked that if all the poets were like Byron he would devote more time than he did to the reading of verse.
They were well received, and brought Professor Longfellow into notice in New England. Soon afterward he published a translation of the ode upon "Coplas de Manrique," by his son, Don Jose Manrique, which won him additional credit. His fugitive poems had become very popular, and had made his name familiar to his countrymen, but as yet he had not collected them in book form.
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