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CHAPTER VI.

HILE these poems were being thrown off for The Knickerbocker Magazine, a more solid literary labour had also been advancing. Throughout the winter of 1838-39 the various chapters of "Hyperion" had been growing under Longfellow's pen, and they served three functions; they were the means by which their author made a careful bid for the position of America's best writer of prose, but they also drew from his mind many of his sorrows, causing them to die in expression, and they hinted a great hope that lay in his heart without having anything to do directly with his intellectual aspirations.

"I have written a Romance during this past year. The feelings of the book are true; the events of the story mostly fictitious. The heroine, of course, bears a resemblance to the lady, without being an exact portrait. There is no betrayal of confidence, no real scene de scribed. 'Hyperion' is the name of the book, not of the hero. It merely indicates that here is the life of one who in his feelings and purposes is a 'son of Heaven and Earth,' and who, though obscured by clouds, yet 'moves on high.' Further than this the name has nothing to do

with the book, and in fact is mentioned only once in the course of it. I expect to be mightily abused. People will say that I am the hero of my own romance, and compare myself to the sun, to Hyperion Apollo. This is not so. I wish only to embody certain feelings which are mine, not to magnify myself. I do not care for abuse, if it is real, manly, hearty abuse. All that I fear is the laudatur et alget, the damnation of faint praise; that I hope to avoid, this time."

So wrote Longfellow to his friend Greene. The book appeared two or three months before "Voices of the Night," but it really inaugurated so completely an epoch in his life, that it is fit to consider it at the beginning of a new chapter. The first thing to notice regarding the book is that, despite the author's assurances to Greene, there never was another work of the kind in which the matter was so plainly autobiographical. Paul Flemming, the hero, is Longfellow the widower, in thought, word, and deed. Mary Ashburton, the heroine, is Frances Appleton, and a faithful portrait of that lady, as every friend of subject and limner has testified. Here a candid critic must feel compelled to remark that the secret purpose of "Hyperion"—the wooing of Miss Appleton-was gone about thus publicly with some appearance of indelicacy. We have seen that Longfellow parted from Miss Appleton in Switzerland, without any word of formal courtship having passed between them. At Boston they had met subsequently; but still the poet had feared to "put it to the touch." In "Hyperion" he heaped up the treasures of his mind before this fair fellow-traveller ; in a thousand suggestive ways he dealt with scenes and

incidents through which they had passed together (these scenes and incidents form the core of the book), and then brought the story to an end by displaying the endeavours of Paul Flemming to forget a woman whom he reverenced as a saint, and loved more than a saint, while she appeared to pass away from him free in her maiden meditations. Who among the friends with any knowledge of Longfellow's travels and fellow-travellers in Switzerland could fail to read between the lines? Had the experiment thus made with a singular boldness failed, “Hyperion" would have been the source of life-long embarrassment to two persons at least.

So much as this needs to be said about the main thread of interest in the book. Of course there is a great deal of colour distributed throughout it that comes entirely from Longfellow's imagination, and in particular the translations of German songs, the criticisms on Jean Paul Richter and other German authors in the Rhenish part of the travelstory were not only beautiful in themselves, but absolutely a new kind of literature to America. At once "Hyperion" set hundreds of readers a-dreaming of pleasant wanderings by the song-haunted German rivers, or in the "Valley of Fountains," where Mary's eyes used sometimes to dim with repressed tears, while Paul Flemming read to her. Every summer, "Hyperion" becomes a Bible to tourists of many nations. Its pictures of the old home of Gothic chivalry, its spiritual sentimentalityJean Paul clarified and diluted—these made a new birth in America; Romance was in the air for the first time.

The prose of these chapters, as prose, is faulty. Its gush is fuller and sublimer than that of Lytton's "Pilgrims

of the Rhine," but with all its learning it is curiously young. The book's aim was to do in America for Central Europe what Washington Irving had done for England and for Italy. This it did and more, for its sympathies with lofty thinkers were deeper than Irving's could have been. But Irving's "Sketch Book" gave birth to a style; Longfellow's prose style has never been copied by any considerable writer. Its redundant imagery is, for one thing, as far from the achievement of poor writers as it is likely to be avoided by writers who are purists in style. But apart from this imagery, the book repels robust minds by constantly verging on mawkishness. Had Longfellow written only "Hyperion," we should have suspected him of being a man with a tendency to paw his friends; a man who lacked fist and grip.

"Hyperion" lends itself peculiarly to illustration by extracts; in this process the cloying effect of reading chapter after chapter is not felt. Here we have the sketch of Paul Flemming :

sun.

"The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the The brightness of our life is gone. Shadows of evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection,-itself a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. Then stars arise, and the night is holy.

"Paul Flemming had experienced this, though still young. The friend of his youth was dead. The bough had broken 'under the burden of the unripe fruit.' And when, after a season, he looked up again from the blindness of his sorrow, all things seemed unreal. Like the

man whose sight had been restored by miracle, he beheld men, as trees, walking. His household gods were broken. He had no home.

His sympathies cried aloud from his desolate soul, and there came no answer from the busy, turbulent world around him. He did not willingly give way to grief. He struggled to be cheerful, -to be strong. But he could no longer look into the familiar faces of his friends. He could no longer live alone where he had lived with her. He went abroad, that the sea might be between him and the grave. Alas! between him and his sorrow there could be no sea but that of time."

Mr. Appleton is drawn as Mr. Berkley :--

"Mr. Berkley was an Englishman of fortune; a goodhumoured, humane old bachelor; remarkable alike for his common sense and his eccentricity. That is to say, the basis of his character was good, sound common sense, trodden down and smoothed by education; but this level groundwork his strange and whimsical fancy used as a dancing-floor, whereon to exhibit her eccentric tricks. His ruling passion was cold-bathing; and he usually ate his breakfast sitting in a tub of cold water, and reading a newspaper. He kissed every child he met; and to every old man said, in passing, 'God bless you!' with such an expression of voice and countenance, that no one could doubt his sincerity. He reminded one of Roger Bontemps, or the Little Man in Gray, though with a difference."

Then comes the softly radiant heroine :

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