ows to the winding Charles and the gentle hills beyond. Great elms, fragrant lilacs, and syringas stand by the broad path which leads to the door, and when the poet was living, the passer-by would often catch a glimpse of him pacing up and down the shaded piazza which is half screened by the shrubberv.

Here came, in the summer of 1837, a slight, studious-looking young man, who lifted the huge brass knocker which hung upon the front door, and very likely thought of the great general as he let it fall with a clang. He had called to see the owner of the house, Mrs. Andrew Craigie, widow of the apothecary-general of the northern provincial army in the Revolution. The visitor asked if there was a room in her house which he could occupy. The stately old lady, looking all the more dignified for the turban which was wound about her head, replied, as she looked at the youthful figure, –

"I lodge students no longer."

"But I am not a student; I am a professor in the University."

"A professor?"

appearance.

She looked curiously at one so unlike most professors in

"I am Professor Longfellow," he said.

"Ah! that is different. I will show you what there is." She led him up the broad staircase, and, proud of her house, opened one spacious room after another, only to close the door of each, saying, "You cannot have that,” until at length she led him into the southeast corner room of the second story. "This was General Washington's chamber," she said. "You may have this; " and here he gladly set up his home. The house was a large one, and already Edward Everett and Jared Sparks had lived there; afterwards, when Mr. Longfellow was keeping house in it, the maker of the dictionary, Mr. Joseph E. Worcester, shared it with him, for there was room for each family to keep a separate establishment, and even a third could have found independent quarters. When Mrs. Craigie died, Mr. Longfellow bought the house, and it has remained in the family ever since.

When he came to Cambridge, in 1837, to be Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, he was thirty years old. He was but eighteen when he graduated at Bowdoin College in the class to which Nathaniel Hawthorne also belonged, and he had given such promise then that he was almost immediately called to be professor at Bowdoin. He accepted the appointment on condition that he might have three years of travel and study in Europe. The immediate result of his life abroad was in some translations, chiefly from the Spanish, in some critical papers, and in "Outre-Mer," his first prose work. He continued at Bowdoin until 1835, when he was invited to Harvard. Again he went to Europe for further study and travel, and then after that spent seventeen years as professor. One of his pupils has given an affectionate account of the teacher's method with his class: "As it happened, the regular recitation rooms of the college were all in use, and we met him in a sort of parlor, carpeted, hung with pictures, and otherwise handsomely furnished, which was, I believe, called The Corporation Room.' We sat round a mahogany table, which was reported to be meant for the dinners of the trustees, and the whole affair had the aspect of a friendly gathering in a pri vate house, in which the study of German was the amusement of the occasion

LONGFELLOW IN HIS HOME.

He began with familiar ballads, read them to us, and made us read them to him. Of course we soon committed them to memory without meaning to, and I think this was probably part of his theory. At the same time we were learning the paradigms by rote. His regular duty was the oversight of five or more instructors who were teaching French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese to two or three hundred under-graduates. We never knew when he might look in on a recitation and virtually conduct it. We were delighted to have him come. . . . . .. We all knew he was a poet, and were proud to have him in the college, but at the same time we respected him as a man of affairs."

Only a few knew him as a professor; thousands have known the poet, and thousands are born every year who will read and enjoy his poetry all their lives. He began to write and to publish poetry as soon as he was fairly settled in the Craigie House, and the place is full of suggestion of his work. "The house, with its great fire-places, its generously proportioned rooms, its hospitable hall and broad staircase, its quaint carvings and tiles, is itself an historic poem. The study is a busy literary man's workshop; the table is piled with pamphlets and papers in orderly confusion; a high desk in one corner suggests a practice of standing while writing, and gives a hint of one secret of the poet's singularly erect form at an age when the body generally begins to stoop and the shoulders to grow round; an orange-tree stands in one window; near it a stuffed stork keeps watch; by the side of the open fire is the 'children's chair;' on the table is Coleridge's ink-stand; upon the walls are crayon likenesses of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Sumner; and in one of the book-cases which fill all the spare wall-space and occupy even one of the windows, are, rarest treasure of all, the poet's own works in their original manuscript, carefully preserved in handsome and substantial bindings.' Here, too, one may see the pen presented by "beautiful Helen of Maine," the old Danish song-book, the antique pitcher; upon the staircase is the old clock, which

"points and beckons with its hands;"

across the meadows is the gentle Charles,

"Friends I love have dwelt beside thee,
And have made thy margin dear."

It would be a pleasant task to read closely in Longfellow's poems and discover all the kind words which he wrote of his friends. A man is known by the company he keeps. And how fine must be that nature which gathers into immortal verse the friendship of Agassiz, Hawthorne, Lowell, Sumner, Whittier, Tennyson, Irving, and chooses for companionship among the dead such names as Chaucer, Dante, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare. All these and more will be found strung as beads upon the golden thread of Longfellow's

verse.

After all, the old house where the poet lived is most closely connected with his poems, because it is a home. Here his children were born, and out of its chambers issued those undying poems which sing the deep life of the fireside. Here was "Evangeline" written, one of the most precious tales

of pure and steadfast love; here "The Two Angels," in which he commemorates the birth of one of his own children and the death of Lowell's wife on

the same night; here " Resignation," "To a Child," and the poem "The Children's Hour," which is the most perfect picture of a father and his children in literature. In "The Golden Mile-Stone" he sings:

"Each man's chimney is his Golden Mile-Stone;

Is the central point, from which he measures

Every distance

Through the gateways of the world around him;"

and the secret of Longfellow's power is in the perfect art with which he has brought all the treasures of the old world stories, and all the hopes of the new to this central point; his own fireside has fed the flames of poetic genius, and kept them burning steadily and purely.

Mr. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, and died at his home in Cambridge, March 24, 1882. His life has been written by his brother, the Rev. Samuel Longfellow, and is published in three volumes. In 1886, the Riverside edition of his writings was issued in eleven volumes, thoroughly equipped with introductions and notes.

Might not the sharp bows overwhelm; | Only the long waves, as they broke

Broad in the beam, but sloping aft
With graceful curve and slow degrees,
That she might be docile to the helm,
And that the currents of parted seas,
Closing behind, with mighty force,
Might aid and not impede her course.

CLASS.

In the ship-yard stood the Master,
With the model of the vessel,
That should laugh at all disaster,
And with wave and whirlwind
wrestle!

IV.

Covering many a rood of ground,
Lay the timber piled around;
Timber of chestnut, and elm, and oak,
And scattered here and there, with
these,

The knarred and crooked cedar knees;
Brought from regions far away,
From Pascagoula's sunny bay,
And the banks of the roaring Roanoke !
Ah! what a wondrous thing it is
To note how many wheels of toil
One thought, one word, can set in
motion!

There's not a ship that sails the ocean,
But every climate, every soil,
Must bring its tribute, great or small,
And help to build the wooden wall!

V.

The Master's word

Enraptured the young man heard;
And as he turned his face aside,
With a look of joy and a thrill of pride,

The sun was rising o'er the sea,
And long the level shadows lay,
As if they, too, the beams would be
Of some great, airy argosy,
Framed and launched in a single day. Standing before
That silent architect, the sun,

Had hewn and laid them every one,
Ere the work of man was yet begun.
Beside the Master, when he spoke,
A youth, against an anchor leaning,
Listened, to catch his slightest mean-
ing.

Her father's door,

He saw the form of his promised bride.
The sun shone on her golden hair,
And her cheek was glowing fresh and
fair,

With the breath of morn and the soft
sea air.