Give him your best wine!
When you ask two,
The second best will do!'

"He brought in with him two poems translated from Platen's 'Night
Songs.' They are very beautiful.

"'What dusky splendors of song there are in King Alfred's new volume,'
he said. 'It is always a delight to get anything new from him. His
"Holy Grail" and Lowell's "Cathedral" are enough for a holiday, and
make this one notable.'"

When Longfellow talked freely as at this dinner, it was difficult to
remember that he was not really a talker. The natural reserve of his
nature made it sometimes impossible for him to express himself in
ordinary intercourse. He never truly made a confidant of anybody
except his Muse.

"I never thought," he wrote about this time, "that I should come back
to this kind of work." He was busying himself with collecting and
editing "The Poems of Places." "It transports me to my happiest years,
and the contrast is too painful to think of." And again in calmer
mood: "The 'ruler of the inverted year' (whatever that may mean) has,
you perceive, returned again, like a Bourbon from banishment, and is
having it all his own way, and it is not a pleasant way. Very well,
one can sit by the fire and read, and hear the wind roar in the
chimney, and write to one's friends, and sign one's self 'yours
faithfully,' or as in the present instance, 'yours always.'"

His sympathetic nature was ever ready to share and further the gayety