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The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of the last generation Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley have been all sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.
That is why they turned him out of the Church, you know." "So I heard.... Are you a Catholic, Miss Longfellow?" She gave a little shrug. "I was brought up Catholic. Women believe what they are taught, as a rule, don't they?" "I hadn't observed it," Henry said, "particularly. Are women so unlike men then?" "That's quite a question, isn't it. What do you think?"
So the brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master.
From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother.
The circumstances which led to the isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, and the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. The ravages of the war carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like a grove of trees left by a fire.
Well, then, let every child, before going to bed, hold a high court of revelry, let him have an hour the Children's Hour devoted to romp, to dance, to shout, to sing, to riot, and to play, and let him be the master of the revels "Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupation, Which is known as the Children's Hour." Longfellow.
He composed neither songs nor ballads, nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and purity of Longfellow. Emerson had an advantage over his literary contemporaries in the vigorous life he lived. You feel in his writing the energy of necessity.
Moreover, we have been strongly under the English influence. Irving insisted that we ought to be, that we were a young nation, that we ought frankly to follow the leadership of more experienced writers. Longfellow thought we had gone too far that way, and that our poets, at least, ought to be more independent, ought to write in the spirit of America and not of traditional poetry.
Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline" , though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
The fair penitent bent her white forehead, the pastor signed the sign of salvation in the air, the stool was pushed back, the green curtain arose, and Zulma stepped forth to resume the place which she had at first occupied. We are dispensed from further describing her appearance. Longfellow, in speaking of Evangeline, has put it forth in one pregnant line.
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