Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘ [145] “burning doubloon of the celestial bank” ?’¹ It is a curious fact that this exuberant poet Chivers claimed a certain sympathy² with the Boston ‘Dial’ and with the transcendental movement, which had a full supply of its own extravagances; and it is clear that between these two rhetorical extremes there was needed a voice for simplicity. Undoubtedly Bryant had an influence in the same direction of simplicity. But Bryant seemed at first curiously indifferent to Longfellow. ‘Voices of the Night’ was published in 1839, and there appeared two years after, in 1841, a volume entitled ‘Selections from the American Poets,’ edited by Bryant, in which he gave eleven pages each to Percival and Carlos Wilcox, nine to Pierpont, eight to himself, and only four to Longfellow. It is impossible to interpret this proportion as showing that admiration which Bryant seems to have attributed to himself five years later when he wrote to him of the illustrated edition of his poems, ‘They appear to be more beautiful than on former readings, much as I then admired them. The exquisite music of your verse dwells more than ever on my ear.’³ Their personal relation