The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, February 27, 1882. Less than a month later he died, and was laid to rest in Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge. [Illustration: LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN] "LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."--"God must love the common people," said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more attractive, more easily borne, more important, more full of meaning. In his first published volume of poems, _Voices of the Night_ (1839), he shows his aim distinctly in such poems as _A Psalm of Life_. Its lines are the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and noble purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning "Life is real! Life is earnest," and "Lives of great men all remind us," can be repeated by many who know but little poetry, and these very stanzas, as well as many others like them, have affected the lives of large numbers of people. Those born a generation ago not infrequently say that the following stanza from _The Ladder of St. Augustine_ (1850) has been the stepping-stone to their success in life:-- "The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night." His poem, _The Rainy Day_ (1841), has developed in many a person the qualities of patience, resignation, and hopefulness. Repetition makes the majority of things seem commonplace, but even repetition has not robbed lines like these of their power:-- "Be still, sad heart! and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary." Nine days before he died, he wrote his last lines with the same simplicity and hopefulness of former days:-- "Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light. It is daybreak everywhere." As we examine these typical poems, we shall find that all of them appeal to our common experiences or aspirations, and that all are expressed in that simple language which no one need read twice to understand. BALLADS.--Longfellow knew how to tell a story which preserved the simplicity and the vigor of the old ballad makers. His _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ (1839) starts in the true fashion to make us wish to finish the tale:-- "It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter To bear him company." Longfellow says that he wrote this ballad between twelve and three in the morning and that the composition did not come to him by lines, but by stanzas.