Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the greatest of American poets, was born at Portland, Me., February 27, 1807, and died at Cambridge, Mass., March 24, 1882. His celebrated works include: “Voices of the Night,” “Hyperion,” “Poems on Slavery,” “Ballads and Other Poems,” “The Spanish Student,” “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” “Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie,” “The Seaside and the Fireside,” “The Golden Legend,” “A Volume of Poems,” “Song of Hiawatha,” “Poems,” “Courtship of Miles Standish,” “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” “A New England Tragedy,” “Excelsior,” “The Skeleton in Armor,” “The Building of a Ship,” etc.
A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.
—Ernest Renan.
Joseph Ernest Renan, the renowned French Semitic-Orientalist; historian, philologist, and essayist, was born at Treguier, Brittany, February 27, 1823, and died at Paris, October 2, 1892. Among his numerous works may be mentioned: “General History of the Semitic Languages,” “The Life of Jesus,” “Marcus Aurelius,” “Studies in Religious History,” “Questions of the Day,” “Recollections of My Youth,” “New Studies in Religious History,” “Discourses and Conferences,” “Dialogue of the Dead,” “The Song of Songs,” and “Ecclesiastes.”
Samuel Pepys stands at the head of the world’s literature in his own department.... Pepys’ “Diary” has been frequently compared with Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” and with justice in so far as the charm of each arises from the inimitable naïveté of the author’s self-revelations. Boswell had a much greater character than his own to draw, but Pepys had to be his own Johnson. It is giving him no excessive praise to say that he makes himself as interesting as Johnson and Boswell together.... Another Milton is more likely to appear than another Pepys.
“The Age of Dryden,”—Richard Garnett.
Richard Garnett, a noted English librarian and author, was born at Litchfield, February 27, 1835, and died April 13, 1906. He wrote: “Primula,” “Io in Egypt,” “Idylls and Epigrams,” “The Queen and Other Poems,” “Collected Poems,” “The Twilight of the Gods,” “A Short History of Italian Literature,” “Essays in Librarianship and Bibliophily,” etc.
You hail from Dreamland, Dragon-fly?
A stranger hither? So am I
And (sooth to say) I wonder why
We either of us came!
“To a Dragon-fly,”—Agnes M. F. R. Darmesteter.
Agnes M. F. R. Darmesteter, a distinguished English poet, was born in Leamington, February 27, 1857. Her writings include: “A Handful of Honeysuckle,” “Lyrics,” “Retrospect,” “Arden,” a novel, “Emily Brontë,” “The New Arcadia and Other Poems,” “An Italian Garden, a Book of Songs,” “The End of the Middle Ages,” “Essays and Questions in History,” “Life of Renan,” “Collected Poems,” “The Fields of France,” “The Return to Nature,” “The French Ideal,” “Twentieth Century French Writers,” “Madame de Sévigne,” etc.