[60]
natural cosmopolitans.
There was nothing of the proverbial Yankee in their composition.
Whittier was a Quaker by creed, but he was also much of a Yankee in style and manner.
Emerson looked like a Yankee, and possessed the cool Yankee shrewdness.
Lowell's “Biglow Papers” testified to the fundamental Yankee; but the Longfellows were endowed with a peculiar refinement and purity which seemed to distinguish them as much in Cambridge or London as it did in Portland, where there has always been a rather superior sort of society.
It was like French refinement without being Gallic.
No wonder that a famous poet should emanate from such a family.
What we notice especially in the Longfellow Letters during this European sojourn is the admonition of Henry's father, that German literature was more important than Italian,--and the poet was always largely influenced by this afterwards; that Henry did not find Paris particularly attractive, and on the whole preferred the Spanish character to the French on account of its deeper under-currents; that he did not seem to realize the danger that menaced him from Spanish brigands, in spite of the black crosses by the roadside; and that he was not vividly impressed by the famous works of art in the Louvre gallery.
He only notices that one
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