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Beneath an apparent unity it is divided into two camps, one aspiring to destroy the universe and reign over the ruins, the other thinking simply of imposing upon the world a demoniac cult of which it shall be high priest. "This society has its seat in America. It was formerly directed by one Longfellow, an adventurer, born in Scotland, who entitled himself grand priest of the New Evocative Magism.

Higginson, "the best literary critic whom America has yet seen." Sometimes her reviews, like those on the poetry of Longfellow and Lowell, were censured, but she was impartial and able. Society opened wide its doors to her, as it had in Boston. Mrs. Greeley became her devoted friend, and their little son "Pickie," five years old, the idol of Mr. Greeley, her restful playmate.

Frederick II. of Germany and Richard I. of England were both good poets, and were as proud of their verses as they were of their military exploits. Frederick II. may be said to have founded the vernacular in which Dante wrote; and Longfellow rendered into English a poem of Richard's which he composed during his cruel imprisonment in Austria.

If he should manifest psychic traits like those of his Japanese parents, if he should think in the Japanese order, if he should have a tendency to use prepositions as postpositions, if he should drop pronouns and should use honorific words in their place, if he should be markedly suspicious and inferential, if he should bow in making his salutations rather than shake hands, if he should show marked preference for sitting on the floor rather than on chairs, and for chopsticks to knives and forks, and if developing powers as an artist he should naturally paint Japanese pictures, Japanese landscapes, and Japanese faces, finding himself unable to draw according to the canons of Western art, if on developing poetic tastes he should find special pleasure in seventeen syllable or thirty-one syllable exclamatory poems, finding little interest in Longfellow or Shakespeare, if, in short, he should develop a predilection for any distinctive Japanese custom, habit of thought, method of speech, emotion or volition, it would evidently be due to his intrinsic heredity.

I rose fully three feet into the air without conscious effort, and thenceforth pursued my difficult way with a subjective discontent which, I fear, did little honour to my philosophy; thinking, to confess the truth, what an advantage it would be if man, figuratively a mopoke, could become one in reality when all the advantage lay in that direction; also, feeling prepared to wager my official dignity against a pair of that Longfellow would never have apostrophised the welcome, the thrice-prayed-for, the most fair, the best-beloved Night, if he had known what it was to work his passage through pitch-black purgatory, in a state of paradise nudity, with the incongruity of the association pressing on his mind.

At this juncture Countess Tolstoy drew nearer to Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, and our groups somewhat separated. "Our great names?" I repeated. "Either we have no great names now, or we are too close to them to realise how great they are. We seem to be between generations. We have lost our Lowell, and Longfellow, and Poe, and Hawthorne, and Emerson, and we have no others to take their places."

Longfellow was obliged to confess that his library did not contain that venerated volume. The little boy looked very sorry, and presently slipped down from his knee and went away; but early the next morning Longfellow saw him coming up the walk with something tightly clasped in his little fists. The child had brought him two cents with which he was to buy a "Jack the Giant-Killer" to be his own.

In the course of the next fortnight the family arrangements all altered themselves. Unless when Beckard was there Aaron would sit in the widow's place, the widow would take Susan's chair, and the two girls would be opposite. And then Dunn would read to them; not sermons, but passages from Shakspeare, and Byron, and Longfellow. "He reads much better than Mr. Beckard," Susan had said one night.

He was a severe and exacting critic. Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whittier were all nearly of the same age, and formed a literary galaxy such as has been rare enough in any country or period of history.

If he explored far enough in the dark, narrow streets, where the rivers flow under the windows of empty dwellings; he might see them tottering, and threatening downfall upon each other leaning over and casting shadows, black and mysterious upon the water no line perpendicular, no line horizontal, the very beau-ideal of picturesque decay buildings of which Longfellow might have sung as truly as of Nuremberg,