In most of the criticisms of Longfellow's earlier poetry, including in this grouping even the "Psalm of Life," we lose sight of that fine remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, who said to Aubrey de Vere, "However inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own and an inexplicable charm to be found in them alone." Professor Wendell's criticisms on Longfellow, in many respects admirable, do not seem to me quite to recognize this truth, nor yet the companion fact that while Poe took captive the cultivated but morbid taste of the French public, it was Longfellow who called forth more translators in all nations than all other Americans put together. If, as Professor Wendell thinks, the foundation of Longfellow's fame was the fact that he introduced our innocent American public to "the splendors of European civilization,"{48} how is it that his poems won and held such a popularity among those who already had these splendors at their door? It is also to be remembered that he was, if this were all, in some degree preceded by Bryant, who had opened the doors of Spanish romance to young Americans even before Longfellow led them to Germany and Italy. Yet a common ground of criticism on Longfellow's early poems lay in the very simplicity which made them, then and ever since, so near to the popular heart. Digby, in one of his agreeable books, compares them in this respect to the paintings of Cuyp in these words: "The objects of Cuyp, for instance, are few in number and commonplace in their character--a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figures in no way remarkable. His power, says a critic, reminds me of some of the short poems of Longfellow, where things in themselves most prosaic are flooded with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul."{49} It is quite certain that one may go farther in looking back upon the development of our literature and can claim that this simplicity was the precise contribution needed at that early and formative period. Literature in a new country naturally tends to the florid, and one needs only to turn to the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, or even Bancroft's "History of the United States," to see how eminently this was the case in America. Whatever the genius of Poe, for instance, we can now see that he represented, in this respect, a dangerous tendency, and Poe's followers and admirers exemplified it in its most perilous form. Take, for instance, such an example as that of Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers of Georgia, author of "Eonchs of Ruby," a man of whom Bayard Taylor wrote in 1871, speaking of that period thirty years earlier, "that something wonderful would come out of Chivers."{50} It is certain that things wonderful came out of him at the very beginning, for we owe to him the statement that "as the irradiancy of a diamond depends upon its