“The poverty-stricken millions
        Who challenge our wine and bread,
        And impeach us all as traitors,
        Both the living and the dead,”

his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, “Yes, I often think of those things.”  He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave.  He did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not see the wisdom of their course.  But this was said without censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him.  On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ.  He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle were church-goers.  Once he said something very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.

VII.

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon:  “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtship of Miles Standish” were by that time old stories.  But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics.  His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it never knew decay.  He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another.  The hexameter piece, “Elizabeth,” in the third part of “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success.

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama had a greater future with us.  He was pleased when a popular singer wished to produce his “Masque of Pandora,” with music, and he was patient when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera.  When the late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of his generous character, had taken my play of “A Counterfeit Presentment,” and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could