have never read
a line of Tennyson and probably never heard of Browning." This passage I
take from an admirable recent sketch by Professor Edwin A. Grosvenor of
Amherst College, one of the most cosmopolitan of Americans, who spent
seven years as professor of history at Robert College, Constantinople.
He goes on to tell how, in the largest private library in the Ottoman
Empire, the grand vizier showed him as his favorite book a large volume
of Longfellow, full of manuscript comments in Turkish on the margin,
adding that he knew some of the poems by heart. Professor Grosvenor was
at one time--in 1879--travelling by steamer from Constantinople to
Marseilles with a Russian lady who had been placed under his escort, and
whose nationality could have been detected only by her marvellous
knowledge of half a dozen languages beside her own. A party of
passengers had been talking in French of Victor Hugo, when the Russian
lady exclaimed in English to the last speaker, "How can you, an
American, give to him the place that is occupied by your own Longfellow?
Longfellow is the universal poet. He is better known, too, among
foreigners, than any one except their own poets!" She then repeated the
verses beginning, "I stood on the bridge at midnight," and added, "I
long to visit Boston, that I may stand on the bridge." Then an English
captain, returning from the Zulu war, said, "I can give you something
better than that," and recited in a voice like a trumpet,--

"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream."

Presently a gray-haired Scotchman began to recite the poem,--

"There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!"

An American contributed "My Lost Youth," being followed by a young Greek
temporarily living in England, who sang "Stars of the Summer Night."
Finally the captain of the steamer, an officer of the French navy
detailed for that purpose, whom nobody had suspected of knowing a word
of English, recited, in an accent hardly recognizable, the first verse
of "Excelsior," and when the Russian lady, unable to understand him,
denied the fact of its being English at all, he replied, "Ah, oui,
madame, ca a vient de votre Longfellow" (Yes, madam, that is from your
Longfellow). Six nationalities had thus been represented, and the
Russian lady said, as they rose from the table, "Do you suppose there is
any other poet of any country, living or dead, from whom so many of us
could