together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest?" "Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we broke! the sin here so awfully revealed! — let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that, when we forgot our God, — when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul, it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and he is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever! Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!" That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit. [The Scarlet Letter, a Romance, 1850, chapter 23, "The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter." The text is that of the first edition.] HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Me., Feb. 27, 1807, and died in Cambridge, Mass., March 24, 1882. He came of good English John Alden, whose wooing stock, and could trace his descent on one side from he celebrated in his Courtship of Miles Standish. He graduated at Bowdoin College, where Hawthorne was his classmate, in 1825, and spent three years in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, preparing himself for the duties of the professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. He held this chair six years, relinquishing it when he was appointed to succeed Ticknor as Smith professor of modern languages at Harvard College. In preparation for his new and more distinguished duties he spent another year abroad, enlarging his acquaintance with the Teutonic languages. He occupied the Harvard chair from 1836 until 1854, living in the old and beautiful Craigie House, and breaking the steady round of his academic duties only by a third visit to Europe in 1843. The remainder of his life was spent in Cambridge, with the exception of a final visit, in 1868, to Europe, where he received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, and that of LL.D. from Cambridge. His bust has been placed in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Longfellow's character was remarkably serene, sane, and well balanced. He was an urbane man, who held himself apart from literary jealousies, and devoted himself completely to his studies, his art, and his friends, among whom were many distinguished and noble men. His country should be grateful to him not only for his literary productions, but for his long and earnest studies in the European literatures, - studies which, as a teacher, he did much to make congenial and permanent in American universities. Longfellow's prose works of importance are three in number, Outre-Mer (1833-34), Hyperion (1839), and Kavanagh (1849). The first two are based on his early experiences in foreign travel, and reveal his delight in the study of foreign literatures; but they also reflect the tastes and tendencies of his generation, and express a mood or stage in our national life and literature.] PROSE, at its best, differs from poetry in form rather than in spirit. Verse and prose fiction certainly are closely related divisions of literary art, and it would be no impossible task to transmute the one into the other. If the idea of the correlation and conservation of forces marks the principal advance of science in the nineteenth century, it is of similar importance that literary HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 245 criticism has discovered or rediscovered, within the same period, the relativity and transmutability of genius. Ivanhoe might have been written in the four-beat measure of Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake might have been made to take its place beside The Bride of Lammermoor. More obvious examples of the novel in verse are Evangeline, or the rapidly moving Aurora Leigh, and Lucile; while we have but to set side by side the best tales and the most characteristic poems of Poe, or the prose paragraphs and the metrical proverbs of Emerson, to perceive the comparative unimportance of the choice of the vehicle of expression. It was natural, then, that Longfellow, the Mendelssohn of American literature, should show in his prose-writings the tendencies characterizing his verse, especially as the former appeared in the earlier part of his life and literary career, when his mind and genius were most deeply touched by the time-spirit of sentimental romanticism. The United States, in Longfellow's early manhood, was astir with the enthusiasms of youth, and not unaffected by the irregular passions and imperfect aspirations of juvenility. Studious and even intellectual in a way, it was sadly in need of the benign influences of culture; and culture was not to be had without some sincere search. Social and literary provinciality were made manifest by undue self-assertion on the one hand, and by humble deference to foreign opinion on the other. But foreign opinion very naturally meant, in New England, English opinion of the conventional or academic order, while outside of New England, in the Jeffersonian portions of the new republic, it was too generally synonymous with the excited and irregular pronouncements of French radicalism or the "Napoleonic idea." In these complex circumstances the influence of the gentle calmness of an Irving and the cool austerity of a Bryant were clearly salutary; but neither of these — our earliest authors in the true sense was able to do for a large public, in a notable time, exactly what Longfellow accomplished. Longfellow's mind was always peculiarly susceptible to influences from without; the vicious injustice of Poe's title, Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists, contained an element of truth. A plagiarist he certainly was not; an unconscious imitator at times he was; while more than once he was the disciple in presence of the master. His prose style was not unaffected by that of the author of the SketchBook; some of his contributions to the volume of Miscellaneous Poems from the United States Literary Gazette closely resembled the work, in the same pages, of the writer of Thanatopsis; still later not only the spirit but the metrical forms of Heine reappeared in many a lyric of the heart, sung by the banks of Charles; the trochaic tetrameter of Hiawatha was an adaptation; and last of all the great Florentine less obviously, but not less truly, dominated the thought and style of his translator. But if the foreign sketches entitled Outre-Mer, the entire romance of Hyperion, and even the more distinctly New England story of Kavanagh, show little originality, our debt to them remains deep and lasting. It was because Longfellow was so quickly receptive that he caught so much of the sweetness of rural France, the faded grandeur of the Castilian country, the secret of the time of troubadour or minnesinger, and, above all, the perennial fascination of mediæval Germany. As an American he well knew and fully shared the aspirations of his own people; as a citizen of the world he gathered up and brought home rich spoils from foreign lands, to be utilized in the western states in a day when intelligent guidance was peculiarly necessary. No other did, or could do, so much in this line of salutary effort. The prevalent sentimentality of the time, Longfellow raised into sentiment; his panorama of European life was set before American eyes in a suggestive, as well as pleasing, manner; while, in his chief prose work, Hyperion, he caught and kept and made immediately serviceable the very moonshine and mystery of transcendental romance. The chapter near the close of the work, entitled Footprints of Angels, is written in a style which seems as far removed from current literary fashions as the steel-engraved "embellishments" of the Philadelphia magazines of the forties are removed from an etching by Whistler. But such a chapter did more than make the impressionable youths of the period write "how beautiful" upon the margin of the beloved volume; it induced them to transmute feeling into action and vague sentiment into purposeful endeavor. The difference between 1839 and 1870 is merely the difference between the mortuary inscription which Longfellow made the heart of this chapter and the text of the whole romance, and the brisk Saxon motto which, thirty years after, Edward Everett Hale wrote as the practical creed of Ten Times One Clubs or Look-up Legions. The words are very different; the purpose is one. One must ask, however, in the case of any work of art, whether its form and inherent value have outlasted the time of production. Utility is good, but it does not make literature. Is Longfellow's prose to be remanded to the shelf of the collection of bibliographical varieties, along with the French and Spanish text-books which he so painstakingly prepared for the crude collegians of our essentially provincial little seminaries of the early day? Driftwood was the title prefixed by him to his fugitive essays in prose; the very title of Outre-Mer has been used again for the benefit of a generation of readers that knows not Joseph; and few indeed will agree with Emerson here, as usually, an untrustworthy critic of limited view that Kavanagh was, even in 1849, the best sketch in the direction of the American novel. But if the Concord sage, with many another reader, was surprised to find himself "charmed with elegance in an American book," it was because "elegance" was really present even in parts of Kavanagh, as it was certainly present in Outre-Mer and Hyperion. And elegance, after all, is not a thing to be banished from belles-lettres. CHARLES F. RICHARDSON |