here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never
wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the
secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy
and Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on
the lips of their living men and women and in the books where
soldier and historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record
of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle
of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as
few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to
America. His intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color
and costume and landscape, his ear for folklore and ballad, his
own ripe mastery of words, made him the most resourceful of
international interpreters. And this lover of children, walking
in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and gentleman,
scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the
richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of
Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His
freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country;
his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social
self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which
is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident
expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his
love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests
of the mind; his courage in interpreting those deeper experiences
which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life call
commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his
spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as
much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the
continental roll of its rivers."