Perhaps the most penetrating remark made about Longfellow's art is that of Horace Scudder: "He was first of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations, rather than in their essence." As a translator, he was generally admitted to have no superior in the English tongue, his skill was unvarying and absolutely reliable. Even here it might be doubted whether he ever attained the wonderful success sometimes achieved in single instances, as, for instance, in Mrs. Sarah Austen's "Many a Year is in its Grave," which, under the guise of a perfect translation, yet gives a higher and finer touch than that of the original poem of Rückert. But taking Longfellow's great gift in this direction as it was, we can see that it was somewhat akin to this quality of "composition," rather than of inspiration, which marked his poems. He could find it delightful "To lie And gaze into a summer sky And watch the trailing clouds go by Like ships upon the sea." But it is a vast step from this to Browning's mountain picture "Toward it tilting cloudlets prest Like Persian ships to Salamis." In Browning everything is vigorous and individualized. We see the ships, we know the nationality, we recall the very battle, and over these we see in imagination the very shape and movements of the clouds; but there is no conceivable reason why Longfellow's lines should not have been written by a blind man who knew clouds merely by the descriptions of others. The limitation of Longfellow's poems reveals his temperament. He was in his perceptions essentially of poetic mind, but always in touch with the common mind; as individual lives grow deeper, students are apt to leave Longfellow for Tennyson, just as they forsake Tennyson for Browning. As to action, the tonic of life, so far as he had it, was supplied to him through friends,--Sumner in America; Freiligrath in Europe,--and yet it must be remembered that he would not, but for a corresponding quality in his own nature, have had just such friends as these. He was not led by his own convictions to leave his study like Emerson and take direct part as a contestant in the struggles of the time. It is a curious fact that Lowell should have censured Thoreau for not doing in this respect just the thing which Thoreau ultimately did and Longfellow did not. It was, however, essentially a difference of temperament, and it must be remembered that Longfellow wrote in his diary under date of December 2, 1859, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution,--quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia, for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon."