The poets who love children are the poets whom children love. It is natural that they should care much for each other, because both children and poets look into things in the same way,--simply, with open eyes and hearts, seeing Nature as it is, and finding whatever is lovable and pure in the people who surround them, as flowers may receive back from flowers sweet odors for those which they have given. The little child is born with a poet's heart in him, and the poet has been fitly called "the eternal child." Not that all children or all poets are alike in this. But of Longfellow we think as of one who has always been fresh and natural in his sympathy for children, one who has loved them as they have loved him. We wish he had given us more of the memories of his own childhood. One vivid picture of it comes to us in "My Lost Youth," a poem which shows us how everything he saw when a child must have left within him a life-long impression. That boyhood by the sea must have been full of dreams as well as of pictures. The beautiful bay with its green islands, widening out to the Atlantic on the east, and the dim chain of mountains, the highest in New England, lying far away on the northwestern horizon, give his native city a roomy feeling not often experienced in the streets of a town; and the boy-poet must have felt his imagination taking wings there, for many a long flight. So he more than hints to us in his song: "I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, And catch, in sudden gleams, The sheen of the far-surrounding seas, And islands that were the Hesperides Of all my boyish dreams. And the burden of that old song, It murmurs and whispers still: 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' "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. And the voice of that wayward song Is singing and saying still: 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'"