SOURCE: “Longfellow: Tales of a Wayside Inn,” in The Function of the Poet and Other Essays, edited by Albert Mordell, Houghton Mifflin, 1920, pp. 123-26.

In the following essay, originally published in 1893, Lowell provides a mixed assessment of Tales of a Wayside Inn.

It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will settle into fame. That he has not this of Tennyson, nor that of Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his verse that make day for a moment in...