And while thus Longfellow found his desire for a national literature strengthened at every point by the example of his classmate Hawthorne, so he may have learned much, though not immediately, through the warning unconsciously given by Bryant, against the perils of undue moralizing. Bryant's early poem, "To a Water-Fowl," was as profound in feeling and as perfect in structure as anything of Longfellow's, up to the last verse, which some profane critic compared to a tin kettle of moralizing, tied to the legs of the flying bird. Whittier's poems had almost always some such appendage, and he used to regret in later life that he had not earlier been contented to leave his moral for the reader to draw, or in other words, to lop off habitually the last verse of each poem. Apart from this there was a marked superiority, even on the didactic side, in Longfellow's moralizing as compared with Bryant's. There is no light or joy in the "Thanatopsis;" but Longfellow, like Whittier, was always hopeful. It was not alone that he preached, as an eminent British critic once said to me, "a safe piety," but his religious impulse was serene and even joyous, and this under the pressure of the deepest personal sorrows. It is also to be observed that Longfellow wrote in this same number of "The North American Review" (July, 1837) another paper which was prophetic with regard to prose style, as was the Hawthorne essay in respect to thought. It was a review of Tegner's "Frithiof's Saga" which showed a power of description, brought to bear on Swedish life and scenery, which he really never quite attained in "Hyperion," because it was there sometimes vitiated by a slightly false note. A portion of it was used afterwards as a preface to his second volume of poems ("Ballads and Other Poems"), a preface regarded by some good critics as Longfellow's best piece of prose work. It was, at any rate, impossible not to recognize a fresh and vigorous quality in a descriptive passage opening thus; and I can myself testify that it stamped itself on the memories of young readers almost as vividly as the ballads which followed:--