ages of his "table-talk" at the end of his
memoirs, or when one reads his own list of them in "Kavanagh," the
reader feels a slight inadequacy, as of things good enough to be said,
but not quite worth the printing. Yet at their best, they are sometimes
pungent and telling, as where he says, "When looking for anything lost,
begin by looking where you think it is not;" or, "Silence is a great
peace-maker;" or, "In youth all doors open outward; in old age they all
open inward," or, more thoughtfully, "Amusements are like specie
payments. We do not much care for them, if we know we can have them; but
we like to know they may be had," or more profoundly still, "How often
it happens that after we know a man personally, we cease to read his
writings. Is it that we exhaust him by a look? Is it that his
personality gives us all of him we desire?" There are also included
among these passages some thoroughly poetic touches, as where he says,
"The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts
into a room, with a laugh and a shout, and hands full of flowers." Or
this, "How sudden and sweet are the visitations of our happiest
thoughts; what delightful surprises! In the midst of life's most trivial
occupations,--as when we are reading a newspaper, or lighting a
bed-candle, or waiting for our horses to drive round,--the lovely face
appears, and thoughts more precious than gold are whispered in our ear."

The test of popularity in a poet is nowhere more visible than in the
demand for autographs. Longfellow writes in his own diary that on
November 25, 1856, he has more than sixty such requests lying on his
table; and again on January 9, "Yesterday I wrote, sealed, and directed
seventy autographs. To-day I added five or six more and mailed them." It
does not appear whether the later seventy applications included the
earlier sixty, but it is, in view of the weakness of human nature, very
probable. This number must have gone on increasing. I remember that in
1875 I saw in his study a pile which must have numbered more than
seventy, and which had come in a single day from a single high school in
a Western city, to congratulate him on his birthday, and each hinting at
an autograph, which I think he was about to supply.

At the time of his seventy-fourth birthday, 1881, a lady in Ohio sent
him a hundred blank cards, with the request that he would write his name
on each, that she might distribute them among her guests at a par