That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now--theirs is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole generation of coterie-litterateurs. Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe, there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys: “beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys,” I remember the phrase. I wonder what the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a whisper in the moonlight! That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will react from the hip-pocket flask and petting-party stage of culture. With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things, and the truly great themes of art. Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys. “To be or not to be,” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” are great poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted to tell a story in verse, then assuredly “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy’s “Reliques” and other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found delight in “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” and I don’t believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in America. CHAPTER LXXVII A SNOW-BOUND SAINT