His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language have secured the effect produced by _The Scarlet Letter_. He wished to be impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in _The House of the Seven Gables_, but he says simply:-- "She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue." Sincerity is the marked characteristic of this simplicity in style, and it makes an impression denied to the mere striver after effect, however cunning his art. A writer of imperishable romances, a sympathetic revealer of the soul, a great moralist, a master of style, Hawthorne is to be classed with the greatest masters of English fiction. His artist's hand "Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free." HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 1807-1882 [Illustration: HENRY W. LONGFELLOW] LIFE--Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. His father was a Harvard graduate, and his mother, like Bryant's, was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth. Longfellow, when three years old, began to go to school, and, like Bryant, he published at the ripe age of thirteen his first poem, _Battle of Lovell's Pond_, which appeared in the _Portland Gazette_. Portland made a great impression on the boy. To his early life there is due the love of the sea, which colors so much of his poetry. In his poem, _My Lost Youth_, he says:-- "I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea tides tossing free; And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea."