hfares of life; but, after
all, there is nothing which so frees us from the turbulent ambition and
bustle of the world, nothing which so fills the mind with great and
glowing conceptions, and at the same time so warms the heart with love
and tenderness, as a frequent and close communion with natural scenery.
The scenery of our own country, too, so rich as it is in everything
beautiful and magnificent, and so full of quiet loveliness or of sublime
and solitary awe, has for our eyes enchantment, for our ears an
impressive and unutterable eloquence. Its language is in high mountains,
and in the pleasant valleys scooped out between them, in the garniture
which the fields put on, and in the blue lake asleep in the hollow of
the hills. There is an inspiration, too, in the rich sky that "brightens
and purples" o'er our earth, when lighted up with the splendor of
morning, or when the garment of the clouds comes over the setting sun.

Our poetry is not in books alone. It is in the hearts of those men,
whose love for the world's gain,--for its business and its holiday,--has
grown cold within them, and who have gone into the retirements of
Nature, and have found there that sweet sentiment and pure devotion of
feeling can spring up and live in the shadow of a low and quiet life,
and amid those that have no splendor in their joys, and no parade in
their griefs.

Thus shall the mind take color from things around us,--from them shall
there be a genuine birth of enthusiasm,--a rich development of poetic
feeling, that shall break forth in song. Though the works of art must
grow old and perish away from earth, the forms of nature shall keep
forever their power over the human mind, and have their influence upon
the literature of a people.

We may rejoice, then, in the hope of beauty and sublimity in our
national literature, for no people are richer than we are in the
treasures of nature. And well may each of us feel a glorious and
high-minded pride in saying, as he looks on the hills and vales,--on the
woods and waters of New England,--

"This is my own, my native land."{8}

{3 _Every Other Saturday_, i. 21.}

{4 _United States Literary Gazette_, i. 237, 267, 286.}

{5 _Literary Gazette_, i. 8.}

{6 _United States Literary Gazette_, i. 348.}

{7 _Life_, i. 60.}

{8 First printed from the original MS. in _Every Other Saturday_, i.
116.}

CHAPTER IV

LITERATURE AS A PURSUIT

Longfellow graduated at Bowdoin Coll