e Night" was regarded as signal, because the publisher had
sold 850 copies in three weeks.

The popularity of the "Voices of the Night," though not universal, was
very great. Hawthorne wrote to him of these poems, "Nothing equal to
some of them was ever written in this world,--this western world, I
mean; and it would not hurt my conscience much to include the other
hemisphere."{47} Halleck also said of the "Skeleton in Armor" that there
was "nothing like it in the language," and Poe wrote to Longfellow, May
3, 1841, "I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only
opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the 'Hymn to the
Night,' of the 'Beleaguered City,' and of the 'Skeleton in Armor' of the
fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me."

In most of the criticisms of Longfellow's earlier poetry, including in
this grouping even the "Psalm of Life," we lose sight of that fine
remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, who said to Aubrey de
Vere, "However inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that
of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a
special freshness of their own and an inexplicable charm to be found in
them alone." Professor Wendell's criticisms on Longfellow, in many
respects admirable, do not seem to me quite to recognize this truth, nor
yet the companion fact that while Poe took captive the cultivated but
morbid taste of the French public, it was Longfellow who called forth
more translators in all nations than all other Americans put together.
If, as Professor Wendell thinks, the foundation of Longfellow's fame was
the fact that he introduced our innocent American public to "the
splendors of European civilization,"{48} how is it that his poems won
and held such a popularity among those who already had these splendors
at their door? It is also to be remembered that he was, if this were
all, in some degree preceded by Bryant, who had opened the doors of
Spanish romance to young Americans even before Longfellow led them to
Germany and Italy.

Yet a common ground of criticism on Longfellow's early poems lay in the
very simplicity which made them, then and ever since, so near to the
popular heart. Digby, in one of his agreeable books, compares them in
this respect to the paintings of Cuyp in these words: "The objects of
Cuyp, for instance, are few in number and commonplace in their
character--a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figu