him for honest human matter than for an
indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the "Psalm of Life" that has
made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people, that it
is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this reason, that its
lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our difficult life. They
say so, and they think so: but the poem is not nearly as good as a
sermon; it is not even coherent. But it really has an original cadence
of its own, with its double rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence has
combined, with a belief that they are being edified, to make readers out
of number consider the "Psalms of Life" a masterpiece. You--my learned
prosodist and student of Browning and Shelley--will agree with me that it
is _not_ a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience
brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders can.

How many other poems of Longfellow's there are that remind us of youth,
and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when we read "The
Reaper and the Flowers"! I read again, and, as the poet says,

"Then the forms of the departed
Enter at the open door,
The beloved, the true-hearted
Come to visit me once more."

Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with Theo's
own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," and confess the truth,
which poet brings the break into the reader's voice? It is not the
dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it is the simpler
speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a ballad moves you. I
find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one's old self of the old
years. I don't know a poem "of the affections," as Sir Barnes Newcome
would have called it, that I like better than Thackeray's "Cane-bottomed
Chair." Well, "The Fire of Driftwood" and this other of Longfellow's
with its absolute lack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is not
less tender and true.

"And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes,
Like the stars, so still and saintlike,
Looking downward from the skies."

It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read the
"Voices of the Night" from the same book with us, how long ago! So long
ago that one was half-frightened by the legend of the "Beleaguered City."
I know the ballad brought the scene to me so vividly that I expected,