N the 24th of March, 1882, there passed quietly away from among us one of the most widely popular and bestbeloved poets of this nineteenth century; a man of happy temperament, free from evil and every corroding passion and vice, whose sweet and

labors have an added interest because of his special position as the foremost member of a variously gifted group of brilliant writers united by common enthusiasms. None of these rendered better service to American letters than he, or showed a steadier

New England"-a harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy, whose inalienable claim to distinction lies in the intelligence and refinement derived from some generations of scholarly ancestors.

devotion to the cause of humanity and freedom.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow belonged by birth and inheritance to that better, gentler class of American citizens which Oliver Wendell Holmes has so pleasantly described to us as "the Bramin caste of

His birthplace also was a once stately mansion in that very little town of Portland, in Maine, whose too prosperous condition the "Autocrat" deplores in the

same con

nection. "Meant for a fine town, to ripen like Cheshire cheese within its walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable mold, it seemed likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar ma

terial pros

perity. Still it remains invested with many of its old charms."

And those charms were not yet much impaired when, on the 27th of February, 1807, there was born in it to Stephen Longfellow and his gentle wife, Puritanically named Zilpah, a son whom they

called Henry Wadsworth, mindful of his wife's father, the General Wadsworth, whose stately figure gave the military coloring to the family traditions, which borrowed their scholarly cast from the father, a sensible, honorable, cultivated gentleman, a lineal descendant of that clerkly John Alden, whose traditional love tale is immortalized in the Courtship of Miles Standish, and himself a graduate of Harvard and an able barrister. Mrs. Longfellow, something of an invalid, once beautiful and always sweet-looking, was a lover of music, poetry, and painting, and no foe to social enjoyment. A devoted mother, the friend and confidant of her children, her piety was simple and tender, and her creed could be summed up in the two great commandments. It is evident that her tastes and her belief were not less influential than the refined integrity and high cultivation of her husband, in molding the character and determining the career of their son.

There is much that is attractive, but little that is stirring in the history of Longfellow's happy boyhood. That of his safe, pure, and honorable career at Bowdoin College, which he entered in 1821, is chiefly interesting in showing how soon his character took its life-long bent. There lay a healthy ambition and steady resolution, under the gentle exterior of the slight, blue-eyed lad, with the girl's complexion, who showed himself fastidiously nice in his choice of friends, who easily maintained a high rank in a class full of aspiring, hard-working students, among whom we note Nathaniel Hawthorne, and who at the age of eighteen had already sketched out for himself a plan of life very much like that which he eventually followed. "I will be eminent in something," he declared. Fate was often very kind to Longfellow. His ideal was a purely literary life. The straightened means of his father seemed to render that an impossible ideal; but two favorable events appeared seasonable, at the end of his term of college life, to grant much of his desire. It was intended to found a chair of modern languages at Bowdoin; the young Longfellow was deemed a suitable candidate for the post, and in 1826 was sent on a three years'

tour to Europe, there to qualify himself fittingly for the work.

His European experiences trained and stored his mind wonderfully. So great, indeed, was the power of the Old World over him that he can hardly be reckoned as an exclusively American writer; a cosmopolitan largeness of tone, untinged by the occasional provincialism of his brother authors, marks his style thenceforth. He came home well equipped for his duties, on which he entered in 1829. He continued to hold his post at Bowdoin with applause and success, until he was invited to abandon it for a similar but much more important position at Harvard University, where, on Professor Ticknor's withdrawing from the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages, that chair was offered to Longfellow, and he was again asked to visit Europe, this time for a period of eighteen months, in order to perfect himself in the German language,- - an offer more than congenial to his inclination.

"A good fortune comes at last," he wrote exultingly. To us who can survey his career as a whole, it seems as if Good Fortune had been ever at his side, a true fairy godmother. A heavy grief darkened his enjoyment of this second expedition; but even that sorrow conspired, with his other experiences, to mellow his mind, and give breadth to his thoughts. He was ripe and ready for his life-work when he returned to enter upon his duties at Harvard, toward the end of 1836. These he continued to discharge. ably and assiduously until the summer of 1854, when he resigned his professorship (in which he was succeeded by his friend Mr. Lowell), in order to devote himself entirely to literature, a step which his ample private means now warranted, and which his extraordinary success in authorship seemed to demand; for he had been singularly fortunate as a writer. He had not only done the work of an excellent pioneer for America, directing her brain workers to "fresh fields and pastures new," and pouring the hoarded treasures, the fertilizing wealth of European thought over the then somewhat arid and thinly growing Western literature, but he was happy beyond many pioneers, in that though a new and brilliant school of