eve it would have killed you,--that is, made you a
preacher.

With many thanks, I am yours,

HORACE BUSHNELL.{98}

It would not now be easy to ascertain what these hostile notices of "The
Divine Tragedy" were, but it would seem that for some reason the poem
did not, like its predecessors, find its way to the popular heart. When
one considers the enthusiasm which greeted Willis' scriptural poems in
earlier days, or that which has in later days been attracted by
semi-scriptural prose fictions, such as "The Prince of the House of
David" and "Ben Hur," the latter appearing, moreover, in a dramatic
form, there certainly seems no reason why Longfellow's attempt to
grapple with the great theme should be so little successful. The book is
not, like "The New England Tragedies," which completed the circle of
"Christus," dull in itself. It is, on the contrary, varied and readable;
not merely poetic and tender, which was a matter of course in
Longfellow's hands, but strikingly varied, its composition skilful, the
scripture types well handled, and the additional figures, Helen of Tyre,
Simon Magus, and Menahem the Essenian, skilfully introduced and
effectively managed. Yet one rarely sees the book quoted; it has not
been widely read, and in all the vast list of Longfellow translations
into foreign languages, there appears no version of any part of it
except the comparatively modern and mediaeval "Golden Legend." It has
simply afforded one of the most remarkable instances in literary history
of the utter ignoring of the supposed high water-mark of a favorite
author.

{96 _Modern Painters_, vol. v. chap. xx.}

{97 _Life_, iii. 123, 125.}

{98 _Life_, iii. 192, 193.}

CHAPTER XXII

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Longfellow was the first American to be commemorated, on the mere ground
of public service and distant kinship of blood, in Westminster Abbey.
The impressions made by that circumstance in America were very various,
but might be classed under two leading attitudes. There were those to
whom the English-speaking race seemed one, and Westminster Abbey its
undoubted central shrine, an opinion of which Lowell was a high
representative, as his speech on the occasion showed. There were those,
on the other hand, to whom the American republic seemed a wholly new
fact in the universe, and one which should have its own shrines. To this
last class the