_April 16_.--A short but pleasant visit to Longfellow. I am not one
of the calling kind, but as the author of "Evangeline" kindly took the
trouble to come and see me three years ago in Camden, where I was ill,
I felt not only the impulse of my own pleasure on that occasion, but a
duty. He was the only particular eminence I called on in Boston, and I
shall not soon forget his lit-up face and glowing warmth and courtesy,
in the modes of what is called the old school.
And now just here I feel the impulse to interpolate something about the
mighty four who stamp this first American century with its birthmarks of
poetic literature. In a late magazine one of my reviewers, who ought
to know better, speaks of my "attitude of contempt and scorn and
intolerance" toward the leading poets--of my "deriding" them, and
preaching their "uselessness." If anybody cares to know what I
think--and have long thought and avow'd--about them, I am entirely
willing to propound. I can't imagine any better luck befalling these
States for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from
Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to me, stands
unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss where to
give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each distinctive.
Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym'd philosophy, and
poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing.
Longfellow for rich color, graceful forms and incidents--all that makes
life beautiful and love refined--competing with the singers of Europe
on their own ground, and, with one exception, better and finer work than
that of any of them. Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a
mighty world--bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of
open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders--always
lurkingly fond of threnodies--beginning and ending his long career with
chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages
of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms,
duties--morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as
anything in Eschylus. While in Whittier, with his special themes--(his
outcropping love of heroism and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses
at times like the measur'd step of Cromwell's old veterans)--in Whittier
lives the zeal, the moral energy, that founded New England--the splendid
rectitude and ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox--I must not, dare not,
say the wilfulness and narrowness--though doubtless the world needs
now, and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and
wilfulness.