Ch. 4: Longfellow - Page 2

it is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our difficult life. They say so, and they think so: but the poem is not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent. But it really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the "Psalms of Life" a masterpiece. You--my learned prosodist and student of Browning and Shelley--will agree with me that it is not a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders can.

How many other poems of Longfellow's there are that remind us of youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when we read "The Reaper and the Flowers"! I read again, and, as the poet says,

"Then the forms of the departed Enter at the open door, The beloved, the true-hearted Come to visit me once more."

Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with Theo's own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," and confess the truth, which poet brings the break into the reader's voice? It is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it is the simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a ballad moves you. I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one's old self of the old years. I don't know a poem "of the affections," as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that I like better than Thackeray's "Cane-bottomed Chair." Well, "The Fire of Driftwood" and this other of Longfellow's with its absolute lack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is not less tender and true.

"And she sits and gazes at me With those deep and tender eyes, Like the stars, so still and saintlike, Looking downward from the skies."

It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read the "Voices of the Night" from the same book with us, how long ago! So long ago that one was half-frightened by the legend of the "Beleaguered City." I know the ballad brought the scene to me so vividly that I expected, any frosty night, to see how

"The white pavilions rose and fell On the alarmed air;"

and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark "Three Brethren's Cairn," that I half-hoped to watch when "the troubled army fled"--fled with battered banners of mist drifting through the pines, down to the Tweed and the sea. The "Skeleton in Armour" comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the "Wreck of the Hesperus" touches one in the old, simple way after so many, many days of verse-reading and even verse-writing.

In brief, Longfellow's qualities