Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken
The bond which nature gives,

Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken,
May reach her where she lives.

Not as a child shall we again behold her;
For when with raptures wild

In our embraces we again enfold her,
She will not be a child;

But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion,
Clothed with celestial grace;

And beautiful with all the soul's expansion
Shall we behold her face.

And though at times impetuous with emotion
And anguish long suppressed,

The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean
That cannot be at rest,-

We will be patient, and assuage the feeling
We may not wholly stay;

By silence sanctifying, not concealing,
The grief that must have way.

XIII

It must be confessed that Longfellow never reached the great heights. Stedman quotes Milton's requirement that poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate. Longfellow's poetry was simple; it was sensuous in what charms the ear and eye; but passionate it

An Incessant Worker

43

never was3. He quotes from Cowley approvingly :

The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end of poetry.

It is curious to note in his journal that he considered great crises hardly adapted to poetry. He writes in 1852 :

Every evening we read ourselves into despair in that tragic book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It is too melancholy, and makes one's blood boil too hotly.

This does not show the poet of high inspiration. He knew little of the poet's frenzy. He was a steady writer, laying out 80 much work per day. He writes:

I am confident it is often from sheer laziness when a poet refrains from writing because he is "not in the mood". Until he begins he can hardly tell whether he is in the mood or not. It is the reluctance toward the manual labor of recording one's thoughts, perhaps to the mental labor of settling them in due order.

Never was there a more incessant worker. With him things won were done. Joy lay in the doing. When a new book was given to the printers the compositors could not set it up fast enough for him, and before it was finished he was already casting about for some new volume to succeed it.

XIV

He had no cause to complain of the pecuniary results he received for his work. During his college course he got from one to two dollars each for his poems, but in 1840-41 he got $15 to $20 each, and from 1844 to 1850, $50 each. Then they began to command $100 to $150. Before he was fifty years old the American sales of his books amounted to 325,000 volumes, and of "Miles Standish", which was issued soon after, 25,000 were sold the first week in Boston and 10,000 in London. For the first edition of "Seaside and Fireside " he received $1,000, and for advance sheets of "Miles Standish he received $750 from England. In 1857 he refused an offer of $1,000 from the New York Ledger for ten poems of any length; and for "The Hanging of the Crane" the New York Ledger paid him $3,000, besides $1,000 more to Sam Ward for conducting the negotiation. He received $1,000 each for the right merely to print in Harpers' Magazine the poems "Keramos" and "Morituri Salutamus", while he still retained the copyright.

Ample Pecuniary Recognition

XV

45

As his income from his professorship had always been comfortable, and as his second wife brought him wealth and luxury, the enormous sums he received from his books put within his power all that money could furnish to a man of simple tastes. But he had his troubles like other men. His eyes were weak, with temptation to overwork them. The winter climate of Cambridge was severe for him, and he knew susceptibility to cough and the twinges of neuralgia. He was never a wholly contented man, and he practised resignation where others would have been glad to give thanks.

He was not even wholly free from jealousy.

He writes in his

journal Feb. 24, 1853:

Mr. and Mrs. Stowe came to dinner. Him I have known since my college days. Her I have never seen before. How she is shaking the world with her Uncle Tom's

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, 1812-1896 Cabin! At one step

she has reached the top of the stair-case by which the rest of us climb on our knees year after year. Never was there such a coup-de-main as this! A million of copies of a book within the first year of its publication!

XVI

But the touch of envy in this exclamation is a light one. He was a generous and appreciative critic, especially of the work of his friends. He was keenly sensitive to criticism, and encountered a good deal of it that

he wrote to a friend :

was unkind and unjust. But it was his habit to preserve nothing that could annoy, and

he never felt rancor. When Poe, who had attacked him most virulently, died in misery and disgrace,

What a melancholy death is that of Mr. Poe,-a man so endowed with genius. I never knew him personally, but have always entertained the highest appreciation of his powers as a prose writer and a