"I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tide, tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea."

Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of
language--not a Keats by any means--has often, by sheer force of plain
sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with
music that haunts us and will not be forgotten:

"Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows,
And the brooks of morning run."

There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli's, the Virgin seated with the
Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise.
This poem of Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour," seems, like
Botticelli's painting, to open a door into the paradise of children,
where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden from men--what no
man hath seen at any time.

Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who, with all his science of
verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of it into his
lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the other is the poet
of Death, and of _bizarre_ shapes of death, from which Heaven deliver us!

Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American, though