LONGFELLOW'S CENTENARY.
ITo Tea EDITOR or TOE "SPRoTATOR...) SIR,—The Wednesday of this week, February 27th, sees a century completed since the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I do not know whether the date will be publicly noticed in the United States; in this country few who under- stand the charming character of the poet, true lover of domestic quiet and the private joys of friendship, could have wished that it should have any loud and elaborate honour paid it. But surely of the countless readers and lovers of his verse (not to speak of his prose) many possess the instinct
for anniversaries, and will pay him at this time a special homage in their hearts. True, in a recent review of him, a rather pretentious and " supetior " example of patronising " appreciation," I find that he "is chiefly read and valued to-day by children, and Ly the men and women who have never passed their mental childhood." Whether this is so or not. I must confess, for my part, to a recent access of delight in his thought and diction, during a short time of enforced leisure, and of that sort of fatigue which asks for literature at once charming in form and gentle with the gentle- ness which comes not of the weakness, but the sweetness, of the mind. I went over much of hie verse long familiar, some of it familiar through my whole life, and also over certain poems, "The Hanging of the Crane" among them, which I had not happened to know before. The tranquil but penetrating charm, quite of its own kind, laid a new hold on me. He "found me," in the very spirit of his own beautiful poem of long ago, " The Day is done." And continually I was struck, not only with the sweet fulness of the poetry, but with its frequent brilliancy and perfection of diction. The reviewer referred .to above is pitiless on the hexameters of "Evangeline," which "can hardly be read by any one with an ear." I ought to be humiliated in finding that to me the metre seems to be handled by Longfellow quite as well as by Goethe; both write it in a style no doubt totally different from the magic of Latin and of Virgil; but with both it is the living vehicle of perfect narrative and reflection. Only a true master of verse could have written the " Atchafalaya" scene and the last few pages. And then, what a man he must have been,—son, husband, father, friend, and helper of the helpless! Take the poet and the poems together, and I do not know where to look in the English literature of the whole nineteenth century for quite so beautiful an ensemble.—I am, Sir, &o.,
HANDLEY DUNELBE.
Auckland Castle.
[Ibis a great pleasure to publish the Bishop of Durham's appreciation of Longfellow. Though there is a monotony of cadence in the "Evangeline" hexameters, which, in our opinion, places them metrically below those of Clough and of Kingsley, they have many beauties; and if we consider them in connexion with the trochaics of "Hiawatha," it must be admitted that Longfellow was a master of unrhymed verse. We are confident that the Bishops letter will give keen satisfaction to thousands of readers, not only here, but in America.—En. Spectator.]
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