The nature of Longfellow’s secret studies is partly indicated by the extent of his published translations. Although one could hardly aver that the poet was anything like a linguistic investigator in the modern sense, he had a wide acquaintance with Germanic and Romance literatures; he spoke several modern tongues with fluency; and he had a sufficient command of idiom to translate with seeming ease from Swedish, German, Old English, French, Spanish, and Italian. His renderings from Tegnér’s “Frithiof’s Saga” seemed so true to the original that the Swedish poet urged Longfellow to complete the translation. The versions of Uhland and others which he made in Germany during the year 1836 were later on extraordinarily efficacious in popularising German literature for America. He may likewise be counted one of the pioneers among American students of Old English or, as he called it, “Anglo-Saxon.” As a teacher of modern languages, he naturally gave heed to Greek and Latin secondarily, and there came a time when he deplored the fact that his familiarity with Greek had slipped away. Yet he loved the classics, his favourite among the Latin poets being Horace. In Horace, he said, one could find all that was worth while in the message of Goethe, expressed just as well, and uttered earlier. Of course the most considerable piece of scholarship undertaken by Longfellow was his translation of the “Divine Comedy,” a task for which his enthusiastic teaching of Dante had helped to fit him, and one which he had commenced (1839) years before the death of his second wife; yet one which he resumed and mainly completed relatively late in life, and, like Bryant’s Homer, something taken up as the resource of a soul bitterly bereaved, unable to accomplish spontaneous creative work. In compassing this task, Longfellow had the encouragement and the direct assistance of Norton and Lowell, to whose knowledge and taste the translation as it now stands is greatly indebted. Even so, it cannot rank high in artistic workmanship. First of all, the translator found that, in order to reproduce the sense with fidelity, he must sacrifice the rhyme, a dubious concession so long as metrical structure was to be retained at all. Still, Longfellow’s translation is pure and lucid English; for the beginner in Dante the critical apparatus is valuable even now; and the three sonnets prefixed to the “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso” are in themselves an introduction to Dante of a sort hardly to be surpassed. The best spirit of America is blended in them with the best of the Middle Ages.