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public. In 1868-69 the poet visited Europe, and was everywhere received with the greatest honour. In 1872 appeared Three Books of Song, containing translated as well as original pieces, in 1873 Aftermath, in 1874 The Hanging of the Crane, and in 1875 The Mask of Pandora, and other Poems. Among these "other poems" were "The Hanging of the Crane," "Morituri Salutamus," and "A Book of Sonnets." The Mask of Pandora is a proof of that growing appreciation of pagan naturalism which marked the poet's later years. Though not a great poem, it is full of beautiful passages, many of which point to the riddle of life as yet unsolved, a conviction which grew ever more and more upon the poet, as the ebulliency of romanticism gave way to the calm of classic feeling. In the "Book of Sonnets" are some of the finest things he ever wrote, especially the five sonnets entitled "Three Friends of Mine." These "three friends" were Cornelius Felton, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Sumner, whom he calls
"The noble three,
Who half my life were more than friends to me."
The loss of Agassiz was a blow from which he never entirely recovered; and, when Sumner also left him, he wrote –
"Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn."
He did stay a little longer; but the embers that still burnt in him refused to be covered up. He would fain have ceased writing, and used to say, "It's a great thing to know when to stop"; but he could not stop, and did not stop, till the last. He continued to publish from time to time, in the magazines, poems which showed a clearness of vision and a perfection of workmanship such as he never had equalled at any period of his life. Indeed it may be said that his finest poems were his last. Of these a small collection appeared under the title of Keramos, and other Poems (1878). Besides these, in the years 1875-78 he edited a collection of Poems of Places in thirty-one small volumes. In 1880 appeared Ultima Thule, meant to be his last work, and it was nearly so. In October 1881 he wrote a touching sonnet on the death of President Garfield, and in January 1882, when the hand of death was already upon him, his last poem, Hermes Trismegistus, in which he gives utterance, in language as rich, as that of the early gods, to that strange feeling of awe without fear, and hope without form, with which every man of spotless life and upright intellect withdraws from the phenomena of time to the realities of eternity.
In the last years of his life he suffered a great deal from rheumatism, and was, as he sometimes cheerfully said, "never free from pain." Still he remained as sunny and genial as ever, looking from his Cambridge study windows across the Brighton meadows to the Brookline hills, or enjoying the "free wild winds of the Atlantic," and listening to "The Bells of Lynn" in his Nahant home. He still continued to receive all visitors, and to take occasional runs up to Castine and Portland, the homes of his family. About the beginning of 1882, however, a serious change took place in his condition, and he was obliged to withdraw from the public gaze. Dizziness and want of strength confined him to his room for some time, and, although after some weeks he partially recovered, his elasticity and powers were gone. He now acknowledged the receipt of letters with a printed form. At last the end came. On the 19th March he was seized with violent paroxysms of vomiting and pain, which continued until the 22d, when his mind began to wander. The 23d was passed in a torpid condition, which, though it vanished "on the morning of the 24th, returned in the course of the day, and passed, by insensible degrees, into the profound sleep of death. The poet was buried on the 26th, near his "three friends," in Mount Auburn cemetery. The regret for his loss was universal; for no modern man was ever better loved or better deserved to be loved.
Longfellow was made an LL.D. of Bowdoin College in 1828, at the age of twenty-one, of Harvard in 1859, and of Cambridge (England) in 1868, and D.C.L. of Oxford in 1869. In 1873 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Science, and in 1877 of the Spanish Academy.
In person, Longfellow was rather below middle height, broad-shouldered, and well built. His head and face were extremely handsome, his forehead broad and high, his eyes full of clear, warming fire, his nose straight and graceful, his chin and lips rich and full of feeling as those of the Praxitelean Hermes, and his voice low, melodious, and full of tender cadences. His hair, originally dark, became, in his later years, silvery white, and its wavy locks combined with those of his flowing beard to give him that leonine appearance so familiar through his later portraits. Charles Kingsley said of Longfellow's face that it was the most beautiful human face he had ever seen. And many agreed with him.
In trying to form an estimate of Longfellow, we are not obliged, as in the case of so many other poets, to distinguish the poet from the man, or to degrade the nature of the former by making it an excuse for the foibles of the latter. In Longfellow, the poet was the flower and fruit of the man. His nature was essentially poetic, and his life incomparably the greatest of his poems. Those who knew only the poems lie wrote could form but a faint notion of the harmony, the sweetness, the manliness, and the tenderness of that which he lived.
Of the two orders of poets distinguished by Aristotle – that of the inspired or plastic, and that of the versatile or observant – Longfellow belonged distinctly to the latter. Nature did not come to him as to a Pythia seated on a tripod, and fill him with passion expressible only in rhythmic prophecy; she did not even call him as a private secretary, and dictate to him her secret messages of love and tenderness, justice and watchfulness, freedom and immortality. He went to nature, sometimes as the Angel of the Annunciation, revealing to her that she was pregnant with divinity, sometimes as a priest pronouncing a benediction over her. What he would have been as a poet, if, instead of visiting Europe in early life and drinking in the spirit of the Middle Age under the shadows of cathedral towers, that point upwards to a world above nature, and backwards to a time when that world darkened the face of nature, he had, like Whittier, grown old amid the uncathedralled paganisms of American scenery and life, we can only guess from his earlier poems, which are as naturalistic, fresh, and unmystical as could be desired; but certain it is that, from his long familiarity with the mediæval view of nature, and its semi-pagan offspring, the romantic view, he was brought, for the greater part of his life, to look upon the world of men and things either as the middle scene of a miracle play, with a heaven of rewarding happiness above and a purgatory of purifying pain below, or else as a garment concealing, while it revealed, spiritual forms of unfathomed mystery. During this time he could hear "the trailing garments of the night sweep through her marble halls," and see "the stars come out to listen to the music of the seas." Later on, as he approached his second youth (he was spared a second childhood), he tended to a more pagan view. About the time when he was writing The Mask of Pandora, he could see "in the sunset Jason's fleece of gold," and hear "the waves of the distracted sea piteously calling and lamenting" his lost friend. But through all the periods of his life his view of the world was essentially religious and subjective, and, consequently, his manner of dealing with it hymnal or lyric. This fact, even more than his merits as an artist, serves to account for his immense popularity. Too well-informed, too appreciative, and too modest to deem himself the peer of the "grand old masters," or one of "those far stars that come in sight once in a century," he made it his aim to write something that should "make a purer faith and manhood shine in the untutored heart," and to do this in the way that should best reach that heart. This aim determined at once his choice of subjects and his mode of treating them.
The subjects of Longfellow's poetry are, for the most part, aspects of nature as influencing human feeling, either directly or through historical association, the tender or pathetic sides and incidents of life, or heroic deeds preserved in legend or history. He had a special fondness for records of human devotion and self-sacrifice, whether they were monkish legends, Indian tales, Norse drápas, or bits of American history. His mode of treatment, as we have already said, is subjective and lyric. No matter what form his works
