The celebration of Longfellow's seventy-fifth birthday by school-children all over the country is something that those children must be glad to think of now—glad to remember that the poet knew how much they cared for him and for what he had written. Even the blind children, who have to read with their fingers, were enjoying his songs with the rest. How pleasant that must have been to him! Certainly, as it seems to me, the best tribute that the young people of the country can pay to his memory is to become more familiar with his poems.
We should not wait until a great and good man has left us before giving him honor, or trying to understand what he has done for us. A dreary world ours would be, if there were no poets' songs echoing through it; and we may be proud of our country that it has a poetry of its own, which it is for us to know and possess for ourselves.
Longfellow has said:
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"What the leaves are to the forest With light and air and food, Ere their sweet and tender juices Have been hardened into wood, That to the world, are children": |
and something like this we may say of his songs. There is in all true poetry a freshness of life which makes the writer of it immortal.
The singer so much beloved has passed from sight, but the music of his voice is in the air, and, listening to it, we know that he can not die.
Inauguration Day
March 4