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