Look at his “Endymion.” It is the earlier verses that win you:
“And silver white the river gleams
As if Diana in her dreams
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.”
That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But the moral and consolatory application is too long—too much dwelt on:
“Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought.”
Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and not only does the poet “moralize his song,” but the moral is feeble, and fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that
“Some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.”
If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.
A poem like “My Lost Youth” is needed to remind one of what the author really was, “simple, sensuous, passionate.” What a lovely verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow’s favourite Finnish “Kalevala,” “a verse of a Lapland song,” like a wind over pines and salt coasts:
“I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tide, tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.”
Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language—not a Keats by any means—has often, by sheer force of plain sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten: