letters, from whom not even he could appeal (It is true, he had never
heard of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern fad.) And
there were the study windows of James Russell Lowell! And his house in
its garden was only one of hundreds of similar houses standing in like
old gardens.

It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-Revolution houses
had not yet left the occupation of the families which built them.
Beautiful houses, a few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on the
other side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris always maintain that
wood was and forever would be the most suitable material for building a
house? On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses,
whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge architecture, blown
clean over by the gale. But the gale that will deracinate Cambridge has
not yet begun to rage.... I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow. In
spite of the fact that he wrote "The Wreck of the _Hesperus_," he seems
to keep his position as the chief minor poet of the English language.
And the most American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge was that
the children of Cambridge had been guided to buy and make inalienable
the land in front of his house, so that his descendant might securely
enjoy the free prospect that Longfellow enjoyed. In what other country
would just such a delicate, sentimental homage have been paid in just
such an ingeniously fanciful manner?[1]

[Footnote 1: This story was related to me by a resident of Cambridge.
Mr. Richard H. Dana, Longfellow's son-in-law, has since informed me that
it is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue. It ought to have
been quite true. The land in question was given by Longfellow's children
to the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city of
Cambridge. The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow an