too much like exile. The loneliness of the situation becomes a weary
burden, and it is dangerous from its very loneliness. Many have died or
lost their health under such conditions (in fact Longfellow came near
losing his life from Roman fever), and he wrote from Paris: "Here one can
keep evil at a distance as well as elsewhere, though, to be sure,
temptations are multiplied a thousand-fold if he is willing to enter into
them." A young man's first experience in London or Paris is a dangerous
sense of freedom; for all the customary restraints of his daily life have
been removed.

Mrs. Stowe says of her beautiful character, "Eva St. Clair," that all bad
influences rolled off from her like dew from a cabbage leaf, and it was
the same with Longfellow throughout. He lived in France, Spain, Italy,
and Germany, and then returned to Portland, the same true American as
when he left there, without foreign ways or modes of thinking, and with
no more than the slight aroma of a foreign air upon him. Longfellow and
his whole family were natural cosmopolitans. There was nothing of the
proverbial Yankee in their composition.

Whittier was a Quaker by creed, but he was also much of a Yankee in style
and manner. Emerson looked like a Yankee, and possessed the cool Yankee
shrewdness. Lowell's "Biglow Papers" testified to the fundamental Yankee;
but the Longfellows were endowed with a peculiar refinement and purity
which seemed to distinguish them as much in Cambridge or London as it did
in Portland, where there has always been a rather superior sort of
society. It was like French refinement without being Gallic. No wonder
that a famous poet should emanate from such a family.

What we notice especially in the Longfellow Letters during this European
sojourn is the admonition of Henry's father, that German literature was