Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[282] mark of the terrible ordeal through which he had passed. When Sydney Dobell was asked to describe Tennyson, he replied, ‘If he were pointed out to you as the man who had written the Iliad, you would answer, “I can well believe it.” ’ This never seemed to be quite true of Tennyson, whose dark oriental look would rather have suggested the authorship of the Arab legend of ‘Antar’ or of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. But it was eminently true of the picturesqueness of Longfellow in his later years, with that look of immovable serenity and of a benignity which had learned to condone all human sins. In this respect Turgenieff alone approached him, in real life, among the literary men I have known, and there is a photograph of the Russian which is often mistaken for that of the American.

Indeed, the beauty of his home life remained always visible. Living constantly in the same old house with its storied associations, surrounded by children and their friends, mingling with what remained of his earlier friends,—with his younger brother, a most accomplished and lovable person, forming one of his own family, and his younger sister living near him in a house of her own,—he was also easily the first citizen of the little University City. Giving readily his time and means to all public interests, even those