reading in various national literatures is shown in the Tales. Among the more familiar poems included in the series are "Paul Revere's Ride," "King Robert of Sicily," and "The Birds of Killingworth."

Literary Characteristics and Contribution. Simplicity, purity, tenderness, beauty,-these are the words that fitly characterize Longfellow's poetry as well as his life. In temperament he was an artist, and he accordingly had a delicate sense of beauty. His verse is full of gentle melody. The music of his lines often saves them from dreary commonplace. His culture was wide, and it permeates his writings as an aroma. His poetry lacks vigor, originality, and strength, but it has the homely household virtues. He is our great domestic poet, "the laureate of the common human heart," as he has been aptly called. And, indeed, it is no small achievement to have won the affection of the masses in this and other lands, where greater geniuses have failed. This popularity is not due to depth of thought, but to feeling and moral soundness joined with charm of style. Longfellow's poetry does not exalt, but it comforts, soothes, and heartens one for the common tasks of life.

(2)

Among the more specific contributions of Longfellow the following are specially noteworthy: (1) The bringing into American literature of extensive old-world culture. He spent a number of years in Europe and became intimately familiar with the rich and varied lore of many lands. These old legends he imported into his own, clothing them in pleasing verse. He is the only American poet to write long narrative poems. Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, are well sustained stories. (3) He is the first American poet to weave into a long narrative the principal Indian legends. Hiawatha is our American epic. (4) He has brought out with notable success the romance of Puritanism in The Courtship of Miles Standish. (5) He is a great ballad-writer and sonnetwriter. The sonnets prefixed to his translation of Dante are

the most artistic in our literature. In general, it may be said that, despite his diffuseness and frequent commonplaceness, Longfellow is likely to continue to be the most widely read American poet.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

His Life. James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 22, 1819, at Elmwood, the comfortable three-story house in the large yard in the outskirts of the old university town. He came of an old New England family, whose name has for generations been prominent in commercial and professional life: his grandfather was a lawyer, his father a clergyman, one uncle gave its name to the city of Lowell and another founded the Lowell Institute in Boston. Lowell's mother was a woman of fine musical ability and imaginative temperament, and she used to read the boy to sleep from Spenser's Fairie Queene. Thus, like many another poet, Lowell early became acquainted with the mellifluous verse of this Elizabethan romancer. At Harvard, which he entered in 1834, he read, as he says, "almost everything except the textbooks prescribed by the faculty." Thus he became acquainted with the older English classics, some of the great Italian poets, particularly Dante, and with Montaigne among the older French writers. Indeed, he was a leader among the more intellectual youths, with whom in those days at Harvard the love of literature amounted to a passion. For his neglect of certain prescribed college duties Lowell was in his senior year "rusticated" at Concord, being allowed, however, to return in time for graduation; as he was not permitted to read his class poem, he distributed printed copies among his classmates. During this stay at Concord he came to know Emerson, with whom he walked and talked, without, however, accepting his transcendental ideas.

After taking his degree in 1838, Lowell entered the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated two years later. But law was not to his taste, and after remaining for a year or two in an office in Boston waiting in vain for clients, during which time he was reading and writing verse, he gave up the law and became editor of The Pioneer. This periodical had a brief career, but among the contributors to the three numbers which did appear were Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, besides Lowell. When the magazine failed, Lowell went to New York, where he remained one winter. In 1843 he published a volume of poems and the next year a prose work on the older English poets. That same year (1844) he

married Miss Maria White, to whom he had been engaged for some time; chiefly through her influence he became an ardent abolitionist.

After spending a few months in Philadelphia as an editorial writer on an anti-slavery paper, he returned to Cambridge and for the next six years lived quietly at Elmwood, writing poetry and reading widely in several literatures. In these years at home were begun some of the enduring friendships of his life; during this time, too, the first great sorrow of his life came in the loss of his little daughter Blanche. In 1851 he went to Europe, and remained for nearly a year in Italy. Mrs. Lowell died in 1853, and there passed out of his life the companionship of a gifted woman of lofty ideals. In 1854-'55 Lowell delivered a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute. The same year he was appointed to the Smith Professorship of Belles-Lettres at Harvard as successor to Longfellow, a position which he held, with the exception of an interval of two years in Europe, until 1877. Before entering upon his duties as college professor he spent another year abroad in study. At Harvard for over twenty years he gave courses in Italian, Spanish, and French literatures, and proved himself an inspiring teacher.

For four years (1857-'61) Lowell was editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and from 1864 to 1872 of the North American Review. Of the Atlantic Monthly

he was the first editor, and to him and Holmes is due in large measure the distinctive literary character of that periodical. The years 1872-'74 he spent in Europe; honorary degrees were conferred upon him by the great English universities.

Lowell's diplomatic career began in 1877 when he was appointed Minister to Spain. Aside from his eminence as a man of letters, he had come into prominence politically through his attacks on certain corruptions in public life in the administrations following the Civil War and also through his selection as delegate to the Republican Convention and as presidential elector in 1876. His appointment as Minister to Spain revived the fine traditions of the days of Washington Irving. In 1880 he was transferred to England, where he represented his country until 1885. As Minister to England he was exceedingly popular; no public occasion seemed complete without a speech from him. No other American representative ever did so much to interpret America to our British cousins. Welcomed as "His Excellency the Ambassador of American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare," Lowell was more than a literary man; his firm administration of his office, his tactfulness, his democracy, and his social gifts, won the admiration of Englishmen and Ameri

cans.

Lowell returned to his dear Elmwood in 1885. Certain partisan and sensational newspapers, as usual, attacked his record as our representative abroad, accusing him of un-American manners and utterances. This provinicial patriotism sooner or later of course recoils upon the inventors' heads; all liberal-minded men know that Lowell was not only thoroughly democratic, but a gentleman and man of the world at the same time, and therefore a national interpreter in the best sense. His last days were spent in retirement in his ancestral home. The second Mrs. Lowell had died in England. His old friends Emerson and Longfellow were dead; Holmes remained, together with such younger men as Curtis, Norton, and Howells. In his library at Elmwood he was again joined to his poets and philosophers; in the elms he heard the robins welcome the springime as of yore and saw the dandelions dot the green with gold. He turned once more to the muses:

Little I ask of Fate; will she refuse

Some days of reconcilement with the Muse?
I take my reed again and blow it free

Of dusty silence, murmuring, "Sing to me!"

It is seldom given to a man to spend his life in the house in which he was born, but such was Lowell's happy lot. At Elmwood he died on

August 12, 1891, and was laid to rest in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, almost across the way, just below the ridge where Longfellow lies.

His Personality.-"He was fond of everything human and natural," says Henry James," "everything that had color and character, and no gayety, no sense of comedy, was ever more easily kindled by contact. When he was not surrounded by great pleasures he could find his account in small ones." Lowell was an intensely vital man and therefore an interesting personality. Those who knew him speak of his perennial youth

fulness, his "robust and humorous optimism," his urbane and whimsical manner. He was the lovable companion, the incomparable talker. Whether as teacher, suggestively commenting in his serio-quizzical way on a passage in Dante, or as a host at Elmwood poking the fire and intimately chatting with a guest, or as diplomat exchanging felicities with British statesmen, or as literary orator dedicating memorials to poets, The Century Magazine, January, 1892.