hen you come to your
home, they will ask you, where is Pushmataha? and you will say to them,
He is no more. They will hear the tidings _like the sound of the fall of
a mighty oak in the stillness of the wood_.' More attention on the part
of our writers to these particulars would give a new and delightful
expression to the face of our poetry. But the difficulty is, that
instead of coming forward as bold, original thinkers, they have imbibed
the degenerate spirit of modern English poetry."{28} What is meant by
this last passage is seen when he goes on to point out that each little
village then had "its little Byron, its self-tormenting scoffer at
morality, its gloomy misanthropist in song," and that even Wordsworth,
in some respects an antidote to Byron, was as yet "a very unsafe model
for imitation;" and he farther points out "how invariably those who have
imitated him have fallen into tedious mannerisms." He ends with a moral,
perhaps rather tamely stated: "We hope, however, that ere long some one
of our most gifted bards will throw his fetters off, and relying on
himself alone, fathom the recesses of his own mind, and bring up rich
pearls from the secret depths of thought."{29}

"The true glory of a nation"--this is his final attitude--"is moral and
intellectual preeminence;" thus distinctly foreshadowing the title of
his friend Charles Sumner's later oration, "The True Grandeur of
Nations." American literature had undoubtedly begun to exist before this
claim was made, as in the prose of Irving and Cooper, the poetry of Dana
and Bryant. But it had awaited the arrival of some one to formulate its
claims, and this it found in Longfellow.

{16 _New England Magazine_, i. 27.}

{17 _Ibid._ iv. 131.}

{18 MS. letter.}

{19 See _Writings of William Austin_, Boston, 1890.}

{20 _New England Magazine_, ii. 188.}

{21 _North American Review_, xxix. 459.}

{22 _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_, vi. 6.}

{23 Goodrich's _Recollections of a Lifetime_, ii. 263, 560.}

{24 _North American Review_, xxxiv. 56.}

{25 _North American Review_, xxxiv. 59.}

{26 _North American Review_, xxxiv. 61.}

{27 _Ib._ 69.}

{28 _North American Review_, xxxiv. 74, 75.}

{29 _Ib._ 78.}

CHAPTER VIII

APPOINTMENT AT HARVARD AND SECOND VISIT TO EUROPE

While he was thus occupied with thoughts and studies which proved to be
more far-seeing than he knew, the young professor was embarrassed by
financial difficulties in which th