I have seen as I have painted him," etc., etc.

Other participants in the imaginary festivities are the late Thomas W.
Parsons, the translator of Dante, who appears as the poet; the
theologian being Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard University, an
eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker,
but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising
scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the
Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had
been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of
this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which
Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of
the participants in the supposed group are now living except Signor
Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his
American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the
group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who
was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful
troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous
philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or
less allied to the Longfellow family by the marriage of her younger
brother, Mr. J. G. Thorp, to the poet's youngest daughter. The volume
has always been popular, even its most ample form; yet most of the
individual poems are rarely quoted, and with the exception of "Paul
Revere's Ride" and "Lady Wentworth" they are not very widely read. These
two are, it is to be observed, the most essentially American among them.
The book was originally to have been called "The Sudbury Tales," and was
sent to the printer in April, 1863, under that title, which was however
changed to "Tales of a Wayside Inn," through the urgency of Charles
Sumner.

It is the common fate of those poets who live to old age, that their
critics, or at least their contemporary critics, are apt to find their
later work less valuable than their earlier. Browning, Tennyson, and
Swinburne, to mention no others, have had to meet this fate, and
Longfellow did not escape it. Whether it is that the fame of the earlier
work goes on accumulating while the later has not yet been tested by
time, or that contemporary admirers have grown older and more critical
when they are introduced to the later verses, this is hard to decide.
Even when the greatest of modern poet