the Divine economy must be conservative of thee," and yet again in lines inscribed upon a flyleaf of a copy of Longfellow's Poems,

"Yet howsoever changed or tost,
Not even a wreath of mist is lost,
No atom can itself exhaust.

"So shall the soul's superior force

Live on and run its endless course
In God's unlimited universe."

Of what the life of the soul is to be after its separation from the body, Whittier's verse is less circumstantial than Bryant's on one hand and less vague than Emerson's on the other. From the belief expressed in The Quaker Alumni and in June on the Merrimac that the dead rest as do we who still live, in God's unchanging mercy alone, and again from the questions asked in The Singer,

"What to shut eyes has God revealed?

What hear the ears that death has sealed?
What undreamed beauty passing show
Requites the loss of all we know?”

from such belief and from such questions, Whittier passed to a number of possibilities which he regarded as highly probable. He often lingered on the thought that the spirits of the dead are near us and have some knowledge of our joys and sorrows. He liked to feel that their happiness is in some measure dependent upon our loving memory of what they were when they lived with us upon earth. There can be, he insisted, no fearful

change, no sudden wonder, no new revealing. The work which best pleased the soul below, he dared say, in one poem, must be the work above; nor did he hesitate to assert elsewhere that the souls of the living must touch the souls of the dead, since, as he said, "God breaks no thread His hand has spun." It is this confidence which underlies The Eternal Goodness; it is this perfect trust which gives strength to the lines called At Last; it is this abiding hope which breathes in Snow Bound. The sceptic falls to silence, and the proud intellect is humbled before the simple faith which led the Quaker poet to write in the face of proofs advanced by the materialist to show that death ends all,

"Yet love will dream, and Faith will trust,
(Since He who knows our need is just),

That somehow, somewhere meet we must.
Alas for him who never sees

The stars shine through his cypress trees!
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,

That Life is ever lord of Death,

And Love can never lose its own!"

VI

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Among American poets, Longfellow is without doubt the most uniformly ethical. It is true that a noble purpose, an elevated ideal, is never lacking in our greater literature, yet Longfellow more than any other American author gives his readers the impression that his sense of goodness was innate rather than accepted, felt rather than defined. Religiously, there is a dignity in Bryant, a pathos in Poe, a loftiness in Emerson, a tenderness in Whittier, not found in Longfellow; still, if the Cambridge poet is lacking to some degree in his possession of these several qualities, he exhibits in their place, when he turns to the contemplation of the duties and conduct of life, unusual clarity of vision, steadiness of heart, and calmness of soul. Bryant interests us, because the paths which led him to confident hope are likewise open to every other man; Poe appeals to us through the very desperation with which he clung to his wavering faith that God is good; Emerson flatters us by the philosophic tone which he imparts to belief; and Whittier increases our self-respect with his insistence that the Holy Spirit finds a dwelling place in every human heart. Longfellow, however, seldom draws us in any of these ways. The religious

element, so far as it finds expression in his poetry, is not evidential as in Bryant, nor romantic as in Poe, nor intellectual as in Emerson, nor intuitional as in Whittier; rather is it moralistic, vary though it may from the tacit on one hand to the openly didactic on the other.

Longfellow's frank acceptance of his moral call has unfortunately made him the victim at times of much adverse criticism and, in some places, of not a little ridicule. With the rise of the theory that art exists solely for art's sake, war was declared against all poetry which had any evident purpose beyond the giving of mere emotional pleasure. It came to be assumed that a person of real culture and true refinement of taste must have outgrown the poems of Longfellow and must therefore either have left them with other playthings of youth to one's successors in the schoolroom, or have handed them pityingly on to such men and women as were dead in the sin of commonplaceness. In time, however, the reaction set in; and signs are not wanting to show that Longfellow's undeviating ethical sincerity is the very quality which assures him a permanent place in literature. It cannot be allowed, of course, that mere preaching in verse, lofty though the lesson may be, is real poetry from any point of view; still even among didactic poets, some are elected unto honor, some unto dishonor. Truth more often than not is beautiful, and so likewise is goodness; and whenever beautiful goodness and beautiful truth draw to themselves adequately

beautiful expression, poetry, as Keats long ago implied, is the inevitable result.

Of Longfellow's openly didactic poems, the most frequently repeated, no doubt, is A Psalm of Life. It has become so familiar, indeed, that we glance at it only to pass it over, or at most to read it without appreciation. That it is not poetry of the highest type may be admitted at the outset; yet the most jaded mind, if it can rid itself of the increment of what others have said, will have some reanswering thrill to many of its noble lines. On the whole, we do not object to being taught, if we are convinced that the teacher speaks as one having real authority. It may be well therefore to refrain from brushing aside too hastily or contemptuously those familiar, unaffected stanzas which frankly point out that "life is real, life is earnest " and rise to a culmination hardly less than scriptural in the lines,

"Act, act in the living Present!

Heart within and God o'erhead!"

The mention of A Psalm of Life brings to mind other poems fully as well known for their like content and equal purpose. The Light of Stars, at the time of its first publication called A Second Psalm of Life, speaks the lesson, "Be resolute and calm, be self-possessed and still "; The Ladder of St. Augustine, adopting the words of the early church father, bids us rise each day upon the wrecks of yesterday; Excelsior, despite the many parodies made upon it, is still capable of enhearten