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A stranger can hardly have an idea of how familiar many of our working people, especially women, are with Longfellow. Thousands can repeat some of his poems who have never read a line of Tennyson and probably never heard of Browning. This passage I take from an admirable recent sketch by Professor Edwin A. Grosvenor of Amherst College, one of the most cosmopolitan of Americans, who spent seven years as professor of history at Robert College, Constantinople. He goes on to tell how, in the largest private library in the Ottoman Empire, the grand vizier showed him as his favorite book a large volume of Longfellow, full of manuscript comments in Turkish on the margin, adding that he knew some of the poems by heart. Professor Grosvenor was at one time--in 1879--travelling by steamer from Constantinople to Marseilles with a Russian lady who had been placed under his escort, and whose nationality could have been detected only by her marvellous knowledge of half a dozen languages beside her own. A party of passengers had been talking in French of Victor Hugo, when the Russian lady exclaimed in English to the last speaker,
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How can you, an American, give to him the place that is occupied by your own Longfellow? Longfellow is the universal poet. He is better known, too, among foreigners, than any one except their own poets! She then repeated the verses beginning,
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I stood on the bridge at midnight, and added,
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I long to visit Boston, that I may stand on the bridge. Then an English captain, returning from the Zulu war, said,
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I can give you something better than that,
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Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream.
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There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there!
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My Lost Youth, being followed by a young Greek temporarily living in England, who sang
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Stars of the Summer Night. Finally the captain of the steamer, an officer of the French navy detailed for that purpose, whom nobody had suspected of knowing a word of English, recited, in an accent hardly recognizable, the first verse of
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Excelsior, and when the Russian lady, unable to understand him, denied the fact of its being English at all, he replied,
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Ah, oui, madame, ça a vient de votre Longfellow (Yes, madam, that is from your Longfellow). Six nationalities had thus been represented, and the Russian lady said, as they rose from the table,
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Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, from whom so many of us could have quoted? Not one. Not even Shakespeare, or Victor Hugo, or Homer.