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I shall never again be in Europe. We thus see his mind at work on American themes in Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet's homeward-looking thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow's work appeared before he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret Fuller said of him,
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He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows. Criticising the very prelude to
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Voices of the Night, she pointed out the phrases
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and
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as indications that he was not merely
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but on many books which described them. But the habit steadily diminished. His very gift at translation, in which he probably exceeded on the whole any other modern poet, led him, nevertheless, always to reproduce old forms rather than create new ones, thus aiding immensely his popularity with the mass of simple readers, while coming short of the full demands of the more critical. To construct his most difficult poems was thus mainly a serene pleasure, and something as far as possible from that conflict which kept Hawthorne all winter, by his wife's testimony, with
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while he was writing
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The Scarlet Letter.
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Longfellow and his Art, the young poet was really preparing himself in Europe for his literary work as well as for his professional work, and half consciously. This is singularly confirmed by his lifelong friend, Professor George W. Greene, who, in dedicating his
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The Life of Nathanael Greene
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We wanted, he says,
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We shall presently encounter this book under the name of
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Outre-Mer. He connects his two aims by saying in the same letter,
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One must write and write correctly, in order to teach. Again he adds,
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The further I advance, the more I see to be done. The more, too, I am persuaded of the charlatanism of literary men. For the rest, my fervent wish is to return home. His brother tells us that among his note-books of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to the children of Cambridge, in 1880:
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Thus the ideas as well as the children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. {14} He also included a quotation from John Lyly's
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Endymion, which ten years later furnished the opening of his own
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Hyperion.
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Dost thou know what a poet is? Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say--a poet.