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Show LONGFELLOW'S FIRST POETRY. He Was More Than Thirty When His First Volume Was Published. Toward the end of 1836 he took up his abode iu Cambridge, where he was to reside for the rest of his life for 45 years. He was made to feel at home in tho society of thoholars who clustered cluster-ed about Harvard.-hen almost the sole center of culture in the country. His work for the college was not so exacting exact-ing that he had not time for literature. The impulse to write poetry returned, yet the ne;;3 book he published was the prose "Hyperion," which apppeared in 1839, and which, though it has little plot or action, may be called a romance. The youthful and poetic hero, a passionate passion-ate pilgrim in Europe, was, more or less, a reflection of Longfellow himself. A few months later in the same year he published Irs first volume of poetry "Voices of the Night" in which he reprinted certain of his earlier verses, most of them written while he was at Bowdoin. Some of these boyish verses show the influence of Bryant, and others oth-ers reveal to us that the young poet had not yet looked at lifo for himself, but still saw it through the stained glass windows of European tradition. The same volume contained also some more recent poems "Tho Beleaguered City" and "The Reaper aud tho Flowers" and the "Psalm of Life' perhaps the first of his poems to win a swift and abiding popularity. These lyrics testified that i Longfellow was beginning to have a Etyle of his own. As Hawthorne wrote to him, "Nothing equal to thorn was ever written in this world this western west-ern world, I mean. " Certainly no American author had yet written any poem of the kind so good as the best of those in Longfellow's Longfel-low's volume of "Ballads," printed two years later. Better than any other American poet Longfellow had mastered master-ed tho difficulties of the story in song, and he knew how to combiuo the swiftness swift-ness and the picturesqueness the ballad requires. His ballads have more of the old time magic, more of the early simplicity, sim-plicity, than those of any other modern English author. Of its kind there is nothing better in tho language than "The Skeleton Iu Armor," with its splendid lyric swing, aud "The Village Blacksmith" and "Tho Wreck of the Hesperus" are almost as good in their humbler sphere. "Excelsior," in the same volume, voices the noble aspirations aspira-tions of youth and has been taken to heart by thousands of boys and girls. Professor Brander M.atthews in St. Nicholas. To the Manner Born. Grubber What a well bred man Mixer is! Dumley (who doesn't like him) He ought to be. His father ia a baker. Quips. Held to the Habit. "I can't let you have any money, that's flat," said the new woman. "Why?" asked the husband, tears gathering in his limpid blue eyes. "Because, '' confessed the breadwinner breadwin-ner shamefacedly, "there is a bargain sale down at Cnttem's, and they are selling the loveliest spring trousers ever seen for &2. 98. I thought I had got over the bargain counter habit, but this is something I cannot resist." Indianapolis Indian-apolis Journal. |