Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Chapter 22: Westminster Abbey

Longfellow was the first American to be commemorated, on the mere ground of public service and distant kinship of blood, in Westminster Abbey. The impressions made by that circumstance in America were very various, but might be classed under two leading attitudes. There were those to whom the English-speaking race seemed one, and Westminster Abbey its undoubted central shrine, an opinion of which Lowell was a high representative, as his speech on the occasion showed. There were those, on the other hand, to whom the American republic seemed a wholly new fact in the universe, and one which should have its own shrines. To this last class the ‘Hall of Fame,’ upon the banks of the Hudson, would appeal more strongly than Westminster Abbey; and it is probable that the interest inspired by that enterprise was partly due, at the outset, to the acceptance of Longfellow in England's greatest shrine. It may be fairly said, however, on reflection, that there is no absolute inconsistency between these two