"The Queen of the West in her garden dressed,
By the banks of the beautiful river."

In the midst of this unrivalled prosperity, this distinction of genius,
and public and private honor, on the ninth of July, 1861, there came one
of the most harrowing tragedies that has ever befallen a man's domestic
life. Longfellow was widowed for the second time, and five children were
left without a mother. It seemed as if Providence had set a limit beyond
which human happiness could not pass. It was after this calamity that
Longfellow undertook his metrical translation of Dante's "Divina
Commedia," a much more difficult and laborious work than writing original
poetry. As his brother said, "He required an absorbing occupation to
prevent him from thinking of the past."

No wonder that in later years he said, in his exquisite verses on the
Mountain of the Holy Cross in Colorado, these pathetic words, "On my
heart also there is a cross of snow." In Longfellow's diary we meet with
the names of many books that he read, and these as well as the pertinent
comments on them tell much more of his intellectual life than we derive
from his letters. "Adam Bede," which took the world by storm, did not
make so much of an impression on him as Hawthorne's "Marble Faun," which
he read through in a day and calls a wonderful book. Of "Adam Bede" he
says: "It is too feminine for a man; too masculine for a woman." He says
of Dickens, after reading "Barnaby Rudge": "He is always prodigal and
ample, but what a set of vagabonds he contrives to introduce us to!"
"Barnaby Rudge" is certainly the most bohemian and esoteric of Dickens's
novels. He liked much better Miss Muloch's "John Halifax,"--a popular
book in its time, but not read very much since. He calls Charles Reade a
clever and amusing writer. We find nothing concerning Disraeli, Trollope,
or Wilkie Collins. Neither do we hear of critical and historical writers