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We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy into the affair.
He concluded it would have to do; and, making a wide circuit of the house, he went around to the stables to harness Longfellow to the buggy. Luckily, the negroes were all in the detached kitchen, eating their supper, so he was able to go and come undetected. When he drove down to the gate he found Nan waiting where he had left her; but now she had a bundle in her arms.
The question may well be raised here, how it happened that America produced so many men of remarkable intellect with such slight opportunities for education in former times, while our greatly improved universities have not graduated an orator like Webster, a poet like Longfellow, or a prose-writer equal to Hawthorne during the past forty years.
Longfellow makes the wraith of the long-buried exile of the armor appear and tell his story: He was a viking who loved the daughter of King Hildebrand, and as royal consent to their union was withheld he made off with the girl, hotly followed by the king and seventy horsemen.
Longfellow was of the most refined social culture, disciplined to self-control under all circumstances and difficulties; sensitive in the highest degree to the forms of courtesy, and incapable by nature as by training of an act or word which could offend the sensibilities of even a discourteous interlocutor, capable at worst of an indignant silence, but incapable of invading the personality of another; not serene, but of an invincible tranquillity; with no sympathy for mystery or obscurity; supremely above the general and commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought; remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought; in short, the ne plus ultra of refinement as man and poet.
By Sabine Baring-Gould. XIII. KING ROBERT OF SICILY From "The Wayside Inn." By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Translated from the Italian by Mrs. Francis Alexander. Originally written in Latin by Messer Torrelo of Casentino, Canonico of Fiesole, and put into Italian by Don Silvano. By Alfred Tennyson. XVII. RIP VAN WINKLE Washington Irving. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But those bright spirits who have redeemed the America of to-day from the dreary waste of vulgar greed and ignorant conceit which we in Europe have flung so heavily upon her; those men whose writings have come back across the Atlantic, and have become as household words among us Irving, Cooper, Longfellow have they not found in the rich store of Indian poetry the source of their choicest thought?
We have clerical authority for affirming that all its miseries were let loose upon the human race by "them greenins" tempting our mother to curious pomological speculations; and from that time till now Longfellow, thou reasonest well! "things are not what they seem," but are diabolically otherwise, masked-batteries, nets, gins, and snares of evil.
Whittier's volume is quite what might have been expected from the greatest of Quaker writers, the worthy compeer of Longfellow, and will give me other extracts to go with "From Massachusetts to Virginia" and "Cassandra Southwick" in my own book, where one of my pleasures will be trying to do justice to American poetry, and Dr. Holmes's fine "Astraea." We have nothing like that nowadays in England.
Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer than feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never broken by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away in the crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can never feel among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when he filled his forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."
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