Authors and Friends

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AUTHORS AND FRIENDS by ANNIE FIELDS
' The Company of the Leaf wore laurel chaplets whose lusty green may not appaired be. They represent the brave and steadfast of all ages, the great knights and champions, the constant lovers and pure women of past and present times.'
Keping beautie fresh and greene For there nis storme that ne may hem deface.
Every year when the lilac buds begin to burst their sheaths and until the full-blown clusters have spent themselves in the early summer air, the remembrance of Longfellow—something of his presence—wakes with us in the morning and recurs with every fragrant breeze. Now is the time to come to Cambridge, he would say; the lilacs are getting ready to receive you.
It was the most natural thing in the world that he should care for this common flower, because in spite of a fine separateness from dusty levels which everyone felt who approached him, he was first of all a seer of beauty in common things and a singer to the universal heart.
Perhaps no one of the masters who have touched the spirits of humanity to finer issues has been more affectionately followed through his ways and haunts than Longfellow. But the lives of men and women who rule us from their urns have always been more or less cloistral. Public curiosity appeared to be stimulated rather than lessened in Longfellow's case by the general acquaintance with his familiar figureand by his unceasing hospitality. He was a tender father, a devoted friend, and a faithful citizen, and yet something apart and different from all these.
From his early youth Longfellow was a scholar. Especially was his power of acquiring language most unusual.
As his reputation widened, he was led to observe this to be a gift as well as an acquirement. It gave him the convenient and agreeable power of entertaining foreigners who sought his society. He said one evening, late in life, that he could not help being struck with the little trouble it was to him to recall any language he had ever studied, even though he had not spoken it for years. He had found himself talking Spanish, for instance, with considerable ease a few days before. He said he could not recall having even read anything in Spanish for many years, and it was certainly thirty since he had given it any study. Also, it was the same with German. I cannot imagine, he continued, what it would be to take up a language and try to master it at this period of my life, I cannot remember how or when I learned any of them;—to-night I have been speaking German, without finding the least difficulty.