This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[75]
work than writing original poetry.
As his brother said, “He required an absorbing occupation to prevent him from thinking of the past.”
No wonder that in later years he said, in his exquisite verses on the Mountain of the Holy Cross in Colorado, these pathetic words, “On my heart also there is a cross of snow.”
In Longfellow's diary we meet with the names of many books that he read, and these as well as the pertinent comments on them tell much more of his intellectual life than we derive from his letters.
“Adam Bede,” which took the world by storm, did not make so much of an impression on him as Hawthorne's “Marble Faun,” which he read through in a day and calls a wonderful book.
Of “Adam Bede” he says: “It is too feminine for a man; too masculine for a woman.”
He says of Dickens, after reading “Barnaby Rudge” : “He is always prodigal and ample, but what a set of vagabonds he contrives to introduce us to!”
“Barnaby Rudge” is certainly the most bohemian and esoteric of Dickens's novels.
He liked much better Miss Muloch's “John Halifax,” --a popular book in its time, but not read very much since.
He calls Charles Reade a clever and amusing writer.
We find nothing concerning Disraeli, Trollope, or Wilkie Collins.
Neither do we hear of critical and historical
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
Tufts University. provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.