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234

��NOTES BY THE WAV.

��Receives

address at

Carlisle.

��Arrival in London.

��Visits

Tennyson in

tbe Isle of

Wight.

��regarded by the English people. The Daily News truly gave expression to the popular voice when it said :

"He is the familiar friend who has sung to every household, and set to music their aspirations and their affections."

The first intimation he received of this was his reception at Carlisle, where, in reply to an address, he said :

" Coming here as a stranger, this welcome makes me feel that I am not a stranger, for how can a man 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 qualities 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 Tennyson 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

�� �