an Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was
almost feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It
readily took the color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to
impressions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from
books. This first volume contained a few things written during his
student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank verse piece on _Autumn_,
clearly shows the influence of Bryant's _Thanatopsis_. Most of these
_juvenilia_ had nature for their theme, but they were not so sternly
true to the New England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark
and the ivy appear among their scenic properties, and in the best of
them, _Woods in Winter_, it is the English "hawthorn" and not any
American tree, through which the gale is made to blow, just as later
Longfellow uses "rooks" instead of crows. The young poet's fancy was
instinctively putting out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old
World, and in his _Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem_ he
transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with
"glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls and "dim
mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe, {478} Longfellow
returned deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission
to refine our national taste by opening to American readers, in their
own vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign
tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretative, rather than
creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It
merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance
from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began
as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things,
exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Mueller, from
the Danish, French, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from
Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler
ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European
poetry into his own. He loved--

"Tales that have the rime of age
And chronicles of eld."

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit
to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite middle ages,
even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded
friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds
blowing throu