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and beautiful results that not only his own countrymen, but the Germans themselves are entitled to look upon him with a feeling of just pride and satisfaction, the latter, because they may, in a certain sense, consider him as one of their own. We mean Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the illustrious author of Evangeline. As Carlyle among the prosaists of Great Britain, thus among the poets of the United States Longfellow has shown infinitely more admiration for and gone farther in imitation of our great authors, than any Briton or American.
His publications have spread rapidly through the western world, and although he has some, by no means contemptible, rivals in Bryant, Dana and Poe, yet in variety and those chief qualities which are essential to the poetical genius of Germany, we may place him as the first among the American poets.
His eminent position as a scholar and a poet appears to us to be no small guarantee for the more rapid spread of the influence of our nation on the poetry of our Transatlantic brethren.
No other poet, either of England or of America having been germanized to such a degree that almost all his productions bear the German stamp, we shall enter more into detail in treating of his career and literary position than we have been able to do with any other.
Longfellow graduated in 1825 at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, State of Maine, where a pro- fessorship of modern languages was offered to him, before he was twenty years old. He immediately abandoned his law studies and crossed the Atlantic in order to prepare himself for his professorial career by a residence of nearly four years in the principal countries of Northern and Western Europe, chieffy in Germany. In 1829 he returned to America and began his courses of lectures in Brunswick and continued them with brilliant success.,D In 1835 he accepted a professorship at Harvard College, in the old university of Cambridge, Massachussetts and then again visited Northern Europe and Germany to get a deeper insight in the Teutonic literatures in general. Heidelberg he chose for his chief residence. It was here that some of his most touching pieces of poetry were occasioned by the untimely death of his young wife. IIis third and last visit to our country he undertook in 1842 to restore his health, and lived during that residence on the lovely banks of the Rhine.
This continued intercourse with Europe left, of course, the most marked traces in the whole literary activity and particularly in the poetry of this distinguished man, but the most powerfully was he attracted by the history, philosophy and poetry of the land of the Minnesingers, of Luther, and of Goethe.
His imagination was kindled by the rich stores of our romantic lore, from the days of Walter von der Vogelweide down to the second glorious era, and to these as well as to the study of the fascinating works of Goethe he devoted himself with peculiar predilection; and from the amalgamation of his truly poetical gifts with the spirit of these models sprang such a luxuriance of excellent poems, that we do not know of any other American poet, whom we might place above him in this regard. Every one must recognize the true love of nature, innocence, purity and religions earnest that pervade all of our poet's works. 1
It is, however, to be observed that as the child of the republic of the United States of America he could not, in spite of his predilection for the romantic, be a fanatic„laudator temporis acti“, that he understands perflectly well which are the weak sides of European romanticism and that he is far from all sickly sentimentality. He participates, to a certain degree, in the idealism of Schiller, the majestic, objective, classical mind of his admired Goethe and the better qualities of the romanticists.