To Walter Mainwaring,Esq.,Lothian College,Oxford.
My dear Mainwaring,--You are very good to ask me to come up and listen to a discussion,by the College Browning Society,of the minor characters in "Sordello;"but I think it would suit me better,if you didn't mind,to come up when the May races are on.I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in "Sordello,"and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello's story told in an intelligible manner.Your letter,however,set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves,taking up a volume of poetry here and there.
What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember,and honestly describe,the impressions that the same books have made on him at different ages!There is Longfellow,for example.I have not read much in him for twenty years.I take him up to-day,and what a flood of memories his music brings with it!
To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods,blowing over the empty fields,bringing the scents of October,the song of a belated bird,and here and there a red leaf from the tree.There is that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind,in his poetry,or,if it is not there,his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past.Yes,it comes to one out of one's boyhood;it breathes of a world very vaguely realized--a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come.Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means,which comes with early manhood.
Before,one had been content,I am still content,with Scott in his battle pieces;with the ballads of the Border.Longfellow had a touch of reflection you do not find,of course,in battle poems,in a boy's favourites,such as "Of Nelson and the North,"or "Ye Mariners of England."His moral reflections may seem obvious now,and trite;they were neither when one was fifteen.To read the "Voices of the Night,"in particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again,on a Sunday,reading all alone on a summer's day,high in some tree,with a wide prospect of gardens and fields.
There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first found in Longfellow,which has since reached our ears more richly and fully in Keats,in Coleridge,in Tennyson.Take,for example,"The welcome,the thrice prayed for,the most fair,The best-beloved Night!"Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem exquisite still,though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow,though you rather look to 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 ****** 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 ******r 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!