The great literary lesson of Longfellow's life is to be found, after all, in this, that while he was the first among American poets to create for himself a world-wide fame, he was guided from youth to age by a strong national feeling, or at any rate by the desire to stand for the life and the associations by which he was actually surrounded. Such a tendency has been traced in this volume from his first childish poetry through his chosen theme for a college debate, his commencement oration, his plans formed during a first foreign trip, and the appeal made in his first really original paper in the "North American Review." All these elements of aim and doctrine were directly and explicitly American, and his most conspicuous poems, "Evangeline," "The Courtship of Miles Standish," "Hiawatha," and "The Wayside Inn," were unequivocally American also. In the group of poets to which he belonged, he was the most travelled and the most cultivated, in the ordinary sense, while Whittier was the least so; and yet they are, as we have seen, the two who--in the English-speaking world, at least--hold their own best; the line between them being drawn only where foreign languages are in question, and there Longfellow has of course the advantage. In neither case, it is to be observed, was this Americanism trivial, boastful, or ignoble in its tone. It would be idle to say that this alone constitutes, for an American, the basis of fame; for the high imaginative powers of Poe, with his especial gift of melody, though absolutely without national flavor, have achieved for him European fame, at least in France, this being due, however, mainly to his prose rather than to his poetry, and perhaps also the result, more largely than we recognize, of the assiduous discipleship of a single Frenchman, just as Carlyle's influence in America was due largely to Emerson. Be this as it may, it is certain that the hold of both Longfellow and Whittier is a thing absolutely due, first, to the elevated tone of their works, and secondly, that they have made themselves the poets of the people. No one can attend popular meetings in England without being struck with the readiness with which quotations from these two poets are heard from the lips of speakers, and this, while not affording the highest test of poetic art, still yields the highest secondary test, and one on which both these authors would doubtless have been willing to rest their final appeal for remembrance.