Longfellow's earliest volume, "The Voices of the Night," was one of the few books of American poetry that some of us who are now growing old ourselves can remember reading, just as we were emerging from childhood. "The Reaper and the Flowers" and the "Psalm of Life,"--I recall the delight with which I used to repeat those poems. The latter, so full of suggestions which a very young person could feel, but only half understand, was for that very reason the more fascinating. It seemed to give glimpses, through opening doors, of that wonderful new world of mankind, where children are always longing to wander freely as men and women. Looking forward and aspiring are among the first occupations of an imaginative child; and the school-boy who declaimed the words: "Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime," and the school-girl who read them quietly by herself, felt them, perhaps, no less keenly than the man of thought and experience. Longfellow has said that-- "Sublimity always is simple Both in sermon and song, a child can seize on its meaning," and the simplicity of his poetry is the reason why children and young people have always loved it; the reason, also, why it has been enjoyed by men and women and children all over the world. One of his poems which has been the delight of children and grown people alike is the "Village Blacksmith," the first half of which is a description that many a boy might feel as if he could have written himself--if he only had the poet's command of words and rhymes, and the poet's genius! Is not this one of the proofs of a good poem, that it haunts us until it seems as if it had almost grown out of our own mind? How life-like the picture is!-- "And children coming home from school Look in at the open door; They love to see the flaming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor." No wonder the Cambridge children, when the old chestnut-tree that overhung the smithy was cut down, had a memento shaped into a chair from its boughs, to present to him who had made it an immortal tree in his verse! It bore flower and fruit for them a second time in his acknowledgment of the gift; for he told them how-- "There, by the blacksmith's forge, beside the street Its blossoms, white and sweet, Enticed the bees, until it seemed alive, And murmured like a hive. "And when the wind of autumn, with a shout Tossed its great arms about, The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath, Dropped to the ground beneath."