VII.

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: "Evangeline,"
"Hiawatha," and the "Courtship of Miles Standish" were by that time old
stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
another. The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth," in the third part of "Tales
of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he liked my liking its
rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the
English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and
success.

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer
wished to produce his "Masque of Pandora," with music, and he was patient
when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late
Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of
his generous character, had taken my play of "A Counterfeit Presentment,"
and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently
have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own
work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat