Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which
comes with early manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his
battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a touch of
reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy's
favourites, such as "Of Nelson and the North," or "Ye Mariners of
England."

His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither
when one was fifteen. To read the "Voices of the Night," in
particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again, on a
Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with a
wide prospect of gardens and fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first
found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and
fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,

"The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!"

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem exquisite
still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow,
though you rather look to him for honest human matter than for an
indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the "Psalm of Life" that has
made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people, that it
is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this reason, that its