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Show MR. LONGFELLOW AT HOME. Mr. Longfellow is as popular as a writer in Great Britain as he is in his own country; therefore Englishmen love to read descriptions of the poet's appearance, and of the way in which he lives. A writer in the Whitehall Review gratifies them in the following way. A door opens and you are in the study of the great poet of the New World. The walls are paneled to the ceiling with dark polished oak, and you see from the circular-beaded windows with their heavy wooden mullions, and the tall oak chimney-piece with its classic ornamentation that the architect has but reproduced some mansion of the early Georgian era, with which he was familiar across the sea. At one end of the room stand hefty oaken bookcases, framed in drapery of dark red cloth. Here and there, on ornamental brackets, are some marble busts, among them a fine effigy of Gen. (General) Washington. Easy-chairs and reading stands are scattered around. In the center of the room, which is covered with a well-worn Persian carpet, there sits, writing at a round table, littered with books and papers, a tall bony man, apparently about seventy. His long hair and beard are white as snow, but from beneath an ample forehead, indicating considerable intellectual power, there gleams a pair of dark lustrous eyes, from which the fire of youth seems not yet to have fled. He rises with a grave sweetness to salute you. Some chance remark, or some tone of your voice, that recalls to him the wild fells and moors of distant Yorkshire, makes you at once something more than a mere passing stranger. He tells you with pride of the remote Yorkshire ancestry, to which, perhaps, his poetry owes something of its manliness and vigor. And if you happen to be familiar with many of the scenes which he visited nearly half a century ago in Europe, he listens with strange interest as you tell him of the changes which time has wrought in some of the spots on which his Muse has bestowed an undying fame. You walk out with him into the fresh spring morning to see the famous willow, with its giant arms, which spread over the mossy lawn, and form, sometimes, in the warm days of summer, the poet's study. You must admire, too, the great north avenue of majestic elms, of which he may well be proud. It is more than forty years ago since, a grave, studious-looking man of thirty, he first trod its shady pathway, and lifted the huge lion-headed knocker which frowns still from the front door of the house. |