hor himself, in his diaries, was
expressing that longing for American subjects which afterwards
predominated in his career. Though the citizen among us best known in
Europe, most sought after by foreign visitors, he yet gravitated
naturally to American themes, American friends, home interests, plans,
and improvements. He always voted at elections, and generally with the
same party, took an interest in all local affairs and public
improvements, headed subscription papers, was known by sight among
children, and answered readily to their salutations. The same quality of
citizenship was visible in his literary work. Lowell, who was regarded
in England as an almost defiant American, yet had a distinct liking,
which was not especially shared by Longfellow, for English ways. If
people were ever misled on this point, which perhaps was not the case,
it grew out of his unvarying hospitality and courtesy, and out of the
fact vaguely recognized by all, but best stated by that keen critic, the
late Mr. Horace E. Scudder, when he says of Longfellow: "He gave of
himself freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a
charmed circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate.... It
is rare that one in our time has been the centre of so much admiration,
and still rarer that one has preserved in the midst of it all that
integrity of nature which never abdicates."{100}

It is an obvious truth in regard to the literary works of Longfellow,
that while they would have been of value at any time and place, their
worth to a new and unformed literature was priceless. The first need of
such a literature was no doubt a great original thinker, such as was
afforded us in Emerson. But for him we should perhaps have been still
provincial in thought and imitative in theme and illustration; our poets
would have gone on writing about the skylark and the nightingale, which
they might never have seen or heard anywhere, rather than about the
bobolink and the humble-bee, which they knew. It was Emerson and the
so-called Transcendentalists who really set our literature free; yet
Longfellow rendered a service only secondary, in enriching and refining
it and giving it a cosmopolitan culture, and an unquestioned standing in
the literary courts of the civilized world. It was a great advantage,
too, that in his more moderate and level standard of execution there was
afforded no room for reaction. The same attributes that keep Longfellow
fr