WHITTIER: NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS FRIENDSHIPS

TENNYSON

LADY TENNYSON




LONGFELLOW: 1807-1882


Every year when the lilac buds begin to burst their sheaths and until
the full-blown clusters have spent themselves in the early summer air,
the remembrance of Longfellow--something of his presence--wakes with
us in the morning and recurs with every fragrant breeze. "Now is the
time to come to Cambridge," he would say; "the lilacs are getting
ready to receive you."

It was the most natural thing in the world that he should care for
this common flower, because in spite of a fine separateness from dusty
levels which everyone felt who approached him, he was first of all a
seer of beauty in common things and a singer to the universal heart.

Perhaps no one of the masters who have touched the spirits of humanity
to finer issues has been more affectionately followed through his ways
and haunts than Longfellow. But the lives of men and women "who rule
us from their urns" have always been more or less cloistral. Public
curiosity appeared to be stimulated rather than lessened in Longfellow's
case by the general acquaintance with his familiar figureand by his