DEATH OF LONGFELLOW
_Camden, April, '82_.--I have just return'd from an old forest haunt,
where I love to go occasionally away from parlors, pavements, and the
newspapers and magazines--and where, of a clear forenoon, deep in the
shade of pines and cedars and a tangle of old laurel-trees and vines,
the news of Longfellow's death first reach'd me. For want of anything
better, let me lightly twine a sprig of the sweet ground-ivy trailing
so plentifully through the dead leaves at my feet, with reflections
of that half hour alone, there in the silence, and lay it as my
contribution on the dead bard's grave.
Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not only to be eminent
in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present
age, (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody,) but to
bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart
and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is
certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our
materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races,
and especially for the present age in America--an age tyrannically
regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the
financier, the politician and the day workman--for whom and among
whom he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference--poet of the
mellow twilight of the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and in Northern
Europe--poet of all sympathetic gentleness--and universal poet of
women and young people.
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