in the library behind his study.  Death seldom fails to bring serenity to all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow’s noble mask, as I saw it then.  It was calm and benign as it had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify it with “the peace of God.”  All who were left of his old Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.  He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face.  Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect:  “The gentleman we have just been burying,” he said, to the friend who had come with him, “was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.”

I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should be published.

There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite fragmentary.  I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the grace of his most lovely spirit.  We have so far had two men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most patient skill could give its utterance:  one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow.  I shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time.  It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself.

What Longfellow’s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say; that is Time’s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
   Backed their credulity with their credit
   Candle burning on the table for the cigars
   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
   Literary dislikes or contempts
   Memory will not be ruled
   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be