Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics.  He gave freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful.  Those who have looked in his poetry for something else than poetry, or for poetry of some other kind, have not been slow to assert that he was a lady’s poet—­one who satisfied callow youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for men.  Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet himself—­or, rather, a portrait of the poet which frontispieced an illustrated edition of his works—­a “dandy Pindar.”  This is not true of his poetry, or of the best of it.  But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. Hyperion, for example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, interspersed with descriptions of European travel, is, upon the whole, a weak book, overflowery in diction and sentimental in tone.

The crown of Longfellow’s achievements as a translator was his great version of Dante’s Divina Commedia, published between 1867 and 1870.  It is a severely literal, almost a line for line, rendering.  The meter is preserved, but the rhyme sacrificed.  If not the best English poem constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and scholarly paraphrase.  The sonnets which accompanied it are among Longfellow’s best work.  He seems to have been raised by daily communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in his poetry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class of ’29; a class whose anniversary reunions he has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs.  For sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled among American men of letters.  He has been poet, wit, humorist, novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical topics.  In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks high, if not with the highest.  His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste.  He had, even as an undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and many of his good things in this kind, such as the Dorchester Giant and the Height of the Ridiculous, were contributed to the Collegian, a students’ paper.  But he first drew the attention of a wider public by his spirited ballad of Old Ironsides—­

  “Ay!  Tear her tattered ensign down!”—­