Goethe has well expressed it, live "in a period of forced talent." All but a few of Longfellow's early "psalms," and sonnets, were written with books face-down about his writing-pad. He prized translation since it acted as a stimulant. "It stirs up germs of thought." Imagine Burns or Bürger or Keats saying this. As a result his work "induces," as Emerson expressed it, "a serene mood." Seldom do we feel the heart beat faster and suddenly hold our breaths as we catch glimpses of new worlds. All is melodious and serene, in an atmosphere of delicious twilight, and the atmosphere and the melody are everything.

His poetry is really American only in its themes. He cared little for the prosaic, bustling life of his native land; his heart was elsewhere. None of our writers traveled so little in their own country; aside from one trip to Washington he never got further west than New York. He looked eastward rather than westward; the study in the old Craigie House had only eastern windows. The burning problems, the fiery struggle of the forties and fifties really bored him at times. "Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others," he writes in his journal in that tumultous year 1856. "I was amused and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into politics. It was not till after dinner in the library, that we got upon any

thing really interesting." It is like Dumas's turning from the subject of tailors' bills and rents and the cost of living to that of romance with the remark, "Let us now turn to real life." With Sumner, that flame of fire, for his bosom friend, it was impossible for the poet to be wholly indifferent to passing events; he could even write a few graceful and colorless lyrics on slavery that are to Whittier's as water to aqua regia, yet he seems never to have caught the full thrill and meaning of the land and the age in which his life had been cast. He remained to the last the gentle, lovable monkish scholar, content with his friends and his dreams of olden times, oblivious of the fact that a mighty epic was enacting at his very door.

He is our Jean Paul, "the beloved," with his cheery optimism, his belief in the worth of the individual, his genre pictures, his soft dreamy idyls, his Fichte message of resignation, and he is our Uhland with his half-lights, his softened mysticism, his medieval atmosphere, his serene level of excellence. Whether or not his great influence upon the common people at the moment when they were at their most receptive stage was altogether good, is open to question. When America like a schoolgirl was hungry for culture and for poetry, Longfellow gave German romance and he gave little else. He came at the only moment in our history when he

could have had a full hearing, or at least at the only moment when he could have been given the leading place to the exclusion of all others. His enormous popularity, his contagious sentimentalism, his breath of the Old World at this moment when America was peculiarly susceptible-all this, coming at the moment when a new group of poets was gathering, cast a shadow over a whole period of our poetic history. To Longfellow more than to any other cause may be traced the general lack of stamina in American poetry during two generations of poets.

But it is vain to criticize; whatever we may say, Longfellow's place is secure. He will be our beloved poet, just as Uhland and Jean Paul are beloved. His lyrics of consolation will still console the feminine heart though they contain only Fichte set to melody and moonlight. But his influence upon the future cannot be a large one. America and the world have outgrown German romanticism. Lowell wrote young Howells: "You must sweat the Heine out of you as men do mercury"; the young poet of the new century must sweat out Longfellow. We demand to-day not vagueness but sharpness of outline. Whitman is our prophet of to-day, and his influence is spreading and deepening. Full and clear comes the demand: Show us life; tell us the truth of life in the concrete, in words that bite

and burn. The office of the poet no longer is merely to please, or to induce a serene mood. Mere fancy and prettiness, mere conceits and melody, mere atmosphere, mere traditions soft with the years, and longings and dreamings no longer satisfy. The poet is the seer: it is for him to look beyond the day and the year; to voice the truth of our own times, of our own selves, of our native land, and of the years that are yet to be.

THE MODERNNESS OF PHILIP

FRENEAU

I

IT is food for thought that the late war, by all confessed the most perfect masterpiece of Mars, must pass into record as the war that produced no poetry. A few sporadic lyrics here and there, but how many poems may one mention from memory without consulting the collections of war verse? And yet the lives of empires, the greatest and oldest in Europe, trembled for years in the balance, armies with their backs to the last wall fought for the very life of their country, and deeds of heroism were done by millions. Never has there been such need for "Marseillaise" rouses, for soul-kindling battlehymns, for blood-stirring hero ballads, for threnodies and laments at the open graves of martyrs of freedom, for interpretations of the souls of nations, for psalms of comfort, or of faith, or of exultation.

Especially has this been true of America. Is democracy worth giving one's life for if it cannot be sung? Is the American ideal worth holding