Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[24] literature. There will always be a charm in turning over the pages where one sees, again and again, the youthful poems of Bryant and of Longfellow placed side by side and often put together on the same page, the young undergraduate's effusions being always designated by his initials and Bryant's with a perhaps more dignified ‘B.,’ denoting one whose reputation was to a certain extent already established, so that a hint was sufficient. Bryant's poems, it must be owned, are in this case very much better or at least maturer than those of his youthful rival, and are preserved in his published works, while Longfellow's are mainly those which he himself dropped, though they are reprinted in the appendix to Mr. Scudder's ‘Cambridge’ edition of his poems. We find thus in the ‘Literary Gazette,’ linked together on the same page, Longfellow's ‘Autumnal Nightfall’ and Bryant's ‘Song of the Grecian Amazon;’ Longfellow's ‘Italian Scenery’ and Bryant's ‘To a Cloud;’ Longfellow's ‘Lunatic Girl’ and Bryant's ‘The Murdered Traveller.’¹ How the older poet was impressed by the work of the younger we cannot tell, but it is noticeable that in editing a volume of selected American poetry not long after, he assigns to Longfellow, as will presently be seen, a very small