the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs'
blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains
some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic,
although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into
the temper of the monk.

Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. He gave
freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. Those who have looked
in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some
other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet--one
who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces
in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men.
Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself--or, rather, a
portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his
works--a "dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the
best of it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his
prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. _Hyperion_, for
example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with
descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book,
overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone.

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator was his great
version of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, published between 1867 and 1870.
It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering. The meter
is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem
constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and
scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among
Longfellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily
communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle
thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry.