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Updated: June 9, 2025
The best is not too good for the youngest child. Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course essential. But never was a greater mistake made than in thinking that a youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it. Even children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Longfellow's "Hiawatha."
The legends and beliefs of our North American Indians were full of them, and one of the first we selected was the lovely story of "Minnehaha, Laughing Water," from Longfellow's "Hiawatha." The sketch had been sent to us by Miss Dora Wheeler, as the prize composition of the Saturday Composition Class at Julien's Studio in Paris.
Reading Longfellow's Evangeline will lead one to search out the history and geography of Acadia, and so fix indelibly the practical facts concerned, as well as the imagery of a fine poem.
I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked intently upon the face of the dead poet.
He also has the New York edition of 1831. These books are extraordinarily rare; you are more likely to find them in some collection of twopenny rubbish than to buy them in the regular market. Oliver Wendell Holmes's of 1836, and Longfellow's "Voices of the Night," 1839, and Mr. Lowell's "A Year's Life;" none of these can be common, and all are desirable, as are Mr.
But when we are taught in school that Longfellow's Evangeline is also written in "dactylic hexameters," trouble begins for the few inquisitive, since it is certain that if you close your eyes and listen carefully to a dozen lines of Homer's Greek, and then to a dozen lines of Longfellow's English, each written in so-called "hexameters," you are listening to two very different arrangements of time-intervals, so different, in fact, that the two poems are really not in the same "measure" or "metre" at all.
Howe remarked that in that kind of composition one felt prescribed like St. Simeon Stylites by the limitations of the column. One of the best of her witty poems describes Boston on a rainy day, and is called "Expluvior," an innocent parody on Longfellow's "Excelsior," which, by the way, ought to have been called Excelsius. "The butcher came a walking flood, Drenching the kitchen where he stood.
There was a great black crane across it, with two sets of trammels suspended from it, on which you could hang two kettles at the same time. If you have never seen one, get Longfellow's beautiful illustrated poem, "The Hanging of the Crane." A great many old country houses had them, and they were considered extremely handy.
Longfellow's, Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of their poetical wares.
In manuscript are a number of works which I have not had the privilege of seeing: two masses for chorus, orchestra, and organ, a concert overture, a concerto, a sonata, a fantasy and fugue, a fantasy and three études, a suite for 'cello and piano, and a setting of Longfellow's "Golden Legend," which won two votes out of five in the thousand dollar musical festival of 1897, the prize being awarded to Dudley Buck.
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