"The white pavilions rose and fell On the alarmed air;" and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark "Three Brethren's Cairn," that I half-hoped to watch when "the troubled army fled"--fled with battered banners of mist drifting through the pines, down to the Tweed and the sea. The "Skeleton in Armour" comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the "Wreck of the Hesperus" touches one in the old, simple way after so many, many days of verse-reading and even verse-writing. In brief, Longfellow's qualities are so mixed with what the reader brings, with so many kindliest associations of memory, that one cannot easily criticize him in cold blood. Even in spite of this friendliness and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of course, that he does moralize too much. The first part of his lyrics is always the best; the part where he is dealing directly with his subject. Then comes the "practical application" as preachers say, and I feel now that it is sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured. Look at his "Endymion." It is the earlier verses that win you: "And silver white the river gleams As if Diana in her dreams Had dropt her silver bow Upon the meadows low." That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But the moral and consolatory _application_ is too long--too much dwelt on: "Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought, Love gives itself, but is not bought." Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and not only does the poet "moralize his song," but the moral is feeble, and fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that "Some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own." If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl. A poem like "My Lost Youth" is needed to remind one of what the author really was, "simple, sensuous, passionate." What a lovely verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow's favourite Finnish "Kalevala," "a verse of a Lapland song," like a wind over pines and salt coasts: "I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tide, tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and the mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea." Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language--not a Keats by any means--has often, by sheer force of plain sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten: "Ye open the eastern windows, That look towards the sun, Where thoughts are singing swallows, And the brooks of morning run."