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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. VIL APKIL 6, 1007.
be a stranger in a country where he finds all doors
and all hearts open to him ? Besides, I myself am
a Cumberland man for I was born in the county
of Cumberland, in the State of Maine, three
thousand miles from here."
On the 16th of June, 1868, in the Senate House at Cambridge, he was publicly admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. When the scarlet gown was put upon him, the students shouted, " Three cheers for the red man of the West ! "
On the 26th of the same month, when he arrived in London, a flood of hospitality flowed in upon him : the Queen received him at Windsor ; and his countryman Mr. Bierstadt, the landscape painter, gave a dinner in his honour, at which hundreds of celebrities in literature, science, and art were present. With his daughters he spent a Sunday at Gadshill. Dickens had a great affection for him, and Forster, referring to a former visit, speaks of him as
" our attached friend, who possesses all the quali- ties of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial American."
After a fortnight in London, Longfellow and his party went to the Isle of Wight, and spent two days with Tennyson, who in one of his letters to the American poet in the previous year had written :
"We English and Americans should all be brothers as none other among the Nations can be ; and some of us, come what may, will always be so, I trust."
On the 15th of July Mrs. Tennyson enters in her diary :
"Mr. Longfellow arrived with a party of ten. Very English he is, we thought. A. considered his 'Hiawatha' his most original poem, and he quoted his translation, ' Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.' Both poets admired Platen's ' In der Nacht.'" ' Life of Tennyson,' by his Son.
There were forty or fifty guests invited to tea, and Longfellow spoke kindly and graciously to each guest. Although Tenny- son and Longfellow never met again, the friendship was continued by letters on both sides, and in 1877 the American poet sent to his English brother, as a Christmas greeting, his beautiful sonnet ' Wapentake to Alfred Tennyson,' in which he does homage to the mastery in English song of the " sweet historian of the heart " : Therefore to thee the laiirel leaves belong, To thee our love and our allegiance, For thy allegiance to the poet's art. Tennyson in reply wrote that the Christmas greeting was " a very perfect flower from your own spacious garden."
After a stay on the Continent Longfellow
returned for a few days to London, then
went to Oxford to receive the degree of
D.C.L., and thence to Scotland. After a
crowded eighteen months of travel he
reached his home again at Craigie House on
the 1st of September, 1869, as the sun was
setting, " and found Cambridge in all its
beauty ; not a leaf faded." " How glad
I am to be at home ! " he writes the same
night to his lifelong friend Greene.
" There is not a drop of ink in my inkstand, and no bottle can be found. Still, I must write you one word to say we are all safe again at home. How strange and how familiar it all seems ! and how thankful I am to have brought my little flock back to the fold ! The young voices and little feet are musical overhead ; and the year of travel floats away, and dissolves like a Fata Morgana"
In the interesting biography of Longfellow by his brother Samuel, to which I have previously referred, and which has greatly aided me in these notes, we are told that Longfellow's life after his return soon resumed its quiet and even tenor. The shades of evening seem to have been already gathering. His intimate friends Felton and Hawthorne were gone ; Agassiz, who was breaking in health, one day came in, saying, " I cannot work," put his face in his hands, and wept, and in a year he too was gone ; Sumner in 1874 suddenly died, and an unshadowed intercourse of forty years was ended ; Lowell went abroad, and was seen no more by his friend and neighbour. ** So the loneliness grew deeper in the study of Craigie House." Yet there were some choice friends still remaining : Greene, his earliest friend ; Emerson, Wendell Holmes, Norton, and the enlivening presence of the cordial, genial Fields. Many visitors also came, and received a hospitable welcome. In his journals may be found the names of Froude, Kingsley, William Black, Plumptre, Dean Stanley, Salvini, Titiens, and Christine Nilsson. The entries concerning many he knew are so thoroughly characteristic that I feel tempted to give a few extracts taken at random.
Washington Irving, then forty years of age, was in 1827 at Madrid engaged on his life of Columbus. Longfellow thus refers to him :
"I found the author repeated in the man: The same playful humor, the same touches of senti- ment, the same poetic atmosphere, and what I admired still more, the entire absence of literary jealousy."
Here is Dickens described on his visit to America in 1842 :
