Turning over the leaves of your volume of Longfellow, mark these few poems to read first, and if you find one that you like, read it again. Perhaps you will be quite familiar with some, if not most in this list; but if there are some that you do not know, but that attract you on reading once, study those till you have learned to love them; in so doing you will have made a real beginning toward the culture that comes from a systematic study of poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “God’s Acre,” “To the River Charles,” “Maidenhood,” “Excelsior,” “The Belfry at Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Norman Baron,” “The Bridge,” “Curfew,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The Builders,” “Pegasus in Pound,” “Beware,” “The Day is Done,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Tales of a Wayside Inn), “The Birds of Killingworth,” “The Bell of Atri,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hanging of the Crane,” and “Keramos.” These are not all the good poems, and some of these are not even the best; but they are a good list to choose from. Besides these you will perhaps like to read “Hiawatha” first, then “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and finally “Evangeline”; but these longer poems are tales rather than poems, and one does not care to return to them as to the shorter gems. Longfellow is a “humbler poet,” as he himself has expressed it, but he is none the less a poet; and in all literature you will not find a simpler poet, nor one easier to read and like. Next to Longfellow, perhaps the most generally liked modern poet is Tennyson. Tennyson was not a great thinker, like Browning; he was rather the interpreter of the thinker poets, for the reader who could not read Wordsworth and the rest for himself. Tennyson set out in early life to master poetic technique, and he could write more different styles than any other great modern poet. Besides, his poems often have a swing (quite unlike the sweet melody of Longfellow’s) which fascinates many. And he was peculiarly and distinctly the poet of moods. “Break, Break, Break” is little more than a haunting melody in words; and the same may be said of most of the songs in “The Princess,” beautiful as they are. It will take much more time to learn to like Tennyson than it required for Longfellow, for Tennyson is so various, and we must come at him in so many different ways.