It is like the whole world of that old England—the maids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starveling authors—all alive; all (save the authors) full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty old militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer to Fielding—a number of meritorious moderns? Who knows? But do not let us prefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don Quixote on the paths of Spain.
But I cannot convert you. You will turn to some story about store-clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues with the fair.
LONGFELLOW
To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.
My dear Mainwaring,—You are very good to ask me to come up and listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the minor characters in “Sordello;” but I think it would suit me better, if you didn’t mind, to come up when the May races are on. I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in “Sordello,” and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello’s story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.
What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember, and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books have made on him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for example. I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, and what a flood of memories his music brings with it! To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing over the empty fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a belated bird, and here and there a red leaf from the tree. There is that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of one’s boyhood; it breathes of a world very vaguely realized—a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with early manhood.
Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy’s favourites, such as “Of Nelson and the North,” or “Ye Mariners of England.”
His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither when one was fifteen. To read the “Voices of the Night,” in particular—those early pieces—is to be back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer’s day, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardens and fields.
There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,
“The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!”