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that such poetry as Longfellow's had its limitations, but it represented one whole side of life, and that in a way which undoubtedly gave him for many years the widest poetic audience in the English-speaking world.
Only last year I saw a volume of popular poetry, published for wide circulation in England, in which there were more poems by Longfellow than by all English-born poets put together.
The translations of these poems into fifteen languages tells the same story.
The “Psalm of life,” for instance, has been rendered into Sanskrit, Chinese, and Marathi.
Mere popularity is doubtless a very secondary test, but where it shows that the quality of poems has entered into the people's life, it is not an element to be ignored.
It is also to be noticed that Longfellow was to all Americans, at that time, one of the two prime influences through which the treasures of German literature, and especially of German romance, were opened to English readers.
To this day nine-tenths of the Americans who visit Nuremberg and Heidelberg do it under the associations they have gained from Longfellow's prose or verse, and such travellers
Macmillan, 1900.
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