hould add a few words--in fact, I cannot refrain from
adding a few words--with regard to the personal character of a man whom
I knew for more than forty years, and whose friend I was honored to call
myself for thirty years. Never was a private character more answerable
to public performance than that of Longfellow. Never have I known a more
beautiful character. I was familiar with it daily,--with the constant
charity of his hand and of his mind. His nature was consecrated ground,
into which no unclean spirit could ever enter. I feel entirely how
inadequate anything that I can say is to the measure and proportion of
an occasion like this. But I think I am authorized to accept, in the
name of the people of America, this tribute to not the least
distinguished of her sons, to a man who in every way, both in public and
private, did honor to the country that gave him birth. I cannot add
anything more to what was so well said in a few words by Lord Granville,
for I do not think that these occasions are precisely the times for set
discourses, but rather for a few words of feeling, of gratitude, and of
appreciation.'

"The Sub-Dean, in accepting the bust, remarked that it was impossible
not to feel, in doing so, that they were accepting a very great honor to
the country. He could conceive that if the great poet were allowed to
look down on the transactions of that day, he would not think it
unsatisfactory that his memorial had been placed in that great Abbey
among those of his brothers in poetry.

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer moved a vote of thanks to the honorary
secretary and the honorary treasurer, and said he thought he had been
selected for the duty because he had spent two or three years of his
life in the United States, and a still longer time in some of the
British colonies. It gave him the greater pleasure to do this, having
known Mr. Longfellow in America, and having from boyhood enjoyed his
poetry, which was quite as much appreciated in England and her
dependencies as in America. Wherever he had been in America, and
wherever he had met Americans, he had found there was one place at least
which they looked upon as being as much theirs as it was England's--that
place was the Abbey Church of Westminster. It seemed, therefore, to him
that the present occasion was an excellent beginning of the recognition
of the Abbey as what it had been called,--the Valhalla of the
English-speaking people. He trusted this beginning w