gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of its rivers." Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems, Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, he selected his themes from our own history. The Building of the Ship, written with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. "It is a wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." The Skeleton in Armor, A Ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, The Wreck of the Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his skill in story-telling in verse--witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn--Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy now published under the title of Christus, made up of The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend, and New England Tragedies, added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, The Divina Commedia, A Nameless Grave, Felton, Sumner, Nature, My Books, are among the imperishable treasures of the English language. In descriptive pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, in such personal and occasional verses as The Herons of Elmwood, The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz, and the noble Morituri Salutamus written for his classmates in 1875, he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of his technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two of the most popular of all his early pieces, The Psalm of Life and Excelsior, have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in Maidenhood, The Rainy Day, The Bridge, The Day is Done, verses whose simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, The Fire of Driftwood, The Arsenal at