nce of social self-consciousness; his tranquil
and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted
soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous
national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to
world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those
deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know
life call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his
spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a
part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of
its rivers."

Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national
asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems,
"Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and "The Courtship of Miles Standish," he
selected his themes from our own history. "The Building of the Ship,"
written with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national
anthem. "It is a wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it,
his eyes filled with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." "The
Skeleton in Armor," "A Ballad of the French Fleet," "Paul Revere's
Ride," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," are ballads that stir men still.
For all of his skill in story-telling in verse--witness the "Tales of a
Wayside Inn"--Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy
now published under the title of "Christus," made up of "The Divine
Tragedy," "The Golden Legend," and "New England Tragedies," added little
to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, particularly those
upon "Chaucer," "Milton," "The Divina Commedia," "A Nameless Grave,"
"Felton," "Sumner," "Nature," "My Books," are among the imperishable
treasures of the English language. In descriptive pieces like "Keramos"
and "The Hanging of the Crane," in such personal and occasional verses
as "The Herons of Elmwood," "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz," and
the noble "Morituri Salutamus" written for his classmates in 1875,
he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his
technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and
held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two
of the most popular of all his early pieces, "The Psalm of Life" and
"Excelsior," have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical
mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond
them. And many readers may have