the trailing clouds go by
Like ships upon the sea."

But it is a vast step from this to Browning's mountain picture

"Toward it tilting cloudlets prest
Like Persian ships to Salamis."

In Browning everything is vigorous and individualized. We see the ships,
we know the nationality, we recall the very battle, and over these we
see in imagination the very shape and movements of the clouds; but there
is no conceivable reason why Longfellow's lines should not have been
written by a blind man who knew clouds merely by the descriptions of
others. The limitation of Longfellow's poems reveals his temperament. He
was in his perceptions essentially of poetic mind, but always in touch
with the common mind; as individual lives grow deeper, students are apt
to leave Longfellow for Tennyson, just as they forsake Tennyson for
Browning. As to action, the tonic of life, so far as he had it, was
supplied to him through friends,--Sumner in America; Freiligrath in
Europe,--and yet it must be remembered that he would not, but for a
corresponding quality in his own nature, have had just such friends as
these. He was not led by his own convictions to leave his study like
Emerson and take direct part as a contestant in the struggles of the
time. It is a curious fact that Lowell should have censured Thoreau for
not doing in this respect just the thing which Thoreau ultimately did
and Longfellow did not. It was, however, essentially a difference of
temperament, and it must be remembered that Longfellow wrote in his
diary under date of December 2, 1859, "This will be a great day in our
history; the date of a new Revolution,--quite as much needed as the old
one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution
in Virginia, for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to
reap the whirlwind, which will come soon."

His relations with Whittier remained always kindly and unbroken. They
dined together at the Atlantic Club and Saturday Club, and Longfellow
wrote of him in 1857, "He grows milder and mellower, as does his
poetry." He went to Concord sometimes to dine with Emerson, "and meet
his philosophers, Alcott, Thoreau, and Channing." Or Emerson came to
Cambridge, "to take tea," giving a lecture at the Lyceum, of which
Longfellow says, "The lecture good, but not of his richest and rarest.
His subject 'Eloquence.' By turns he was grave and jocose, and had some
striking views and passages. He lets in a thousand ne