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Skilfully the old poet drew out from Edward that sometimes he went to the theatre with his parents. As they returned to the gate of "Craigie House" Edward said he thought he would go back to Boston. "And what have you on hand for this evening?" asked Longfellow. Edward told him he was going to his hotel to think over the day's events. The poet laughed and said: "Now, listen to my plan.
"It is an Italian commentary," he said, "on the Divina Commedia," which had been sent to him that day; and he added that some of the information in it was of a very curious sort. I asked him if he could read Italian as easily as English. "Very nearly," he replied; "but the fine points of Italian are as difficult as those of German." Mr. Longfellow laughed.
There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twenty are. That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest after his lecture.
In the United States we have no poets who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley.
Bryant was the able editor of a newspaper; Lowell made an excellent ambassador; and Longfellow also had the reputation with his publishers of being a very shrewd man of business. So was Emerson in all things eminently practical. He would sometimes say, "I allow myself to be cheated by one Irishman"; but I do not think he was cheated very much.
It does not mean the trite, or the commonplace, or the obvious. It is a strong and sturdy quality, is this simplicity of which I am speaking, and nothing else will atone for lack of it in the public speaker. Longfellow calls it the supreme excellence, since it is the quality which above all others brings serenity to the soul and makes life really worth living.
Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, "Beware, my friend, of mixing up virtue and vice;" but there is something worse than that, and it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never apply to Longfellow. Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course.
There, that's right, as her mimicry evoked a smile, 'I should be ashamed to be unhappy about this, when our good name is saved, and when there is a blessing on the poor, she added in a lower voice, tenderly kissing her husband's weary brow. 'And the boy that walked beside me, He could not understand Why, closer in mine, ah, closer, I press'd his warm soft hand. LONGFELLOW.
The structure consists of a marble sarcophagus supporting the emperor's effigy in bronze in a kneeling position, while on the other side of the aisle are rows of monumental bronze figures, twenty-eight in number, representing various historic characters. The mention of this unique group in the old church of Innspruck, by the poet Longfellow, will be remembered.
He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart's content.
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