It could not be said
of him,--
"His mouth he could not ope,
But out there flew a trope."
Yet there was an exquisite tenderness and effluence from his presence
which was more humanizing and elevating than the eloquence of many
others.
One quotation from a letter to Charles Sumner is too characteristic to
be omitted even in the slightest sketch of Longfellow. He writes: "You
are hard at work; and God bless you in it. In every country the
'dangerous classes' are those who do no work; for instance, the
nobility in Europe and the slaveholders here. It is evident that the
world needs a new nobility,--not of the gold medal and _sangre
azul_ order; not of the blood that is blue because it stagnates,
but of the red arterial blood that circulates, and has heart in it and
life and labor."
Speaking one day of his own reminiscences, Longfellow said, that
"however interesting such things were in conversation, he thought they
seldom contained legitimate matter for book-making; and ----'s life of
a poet, just then printed, was, he thought, peculiarly disagreeable
chiefly because of the unjustifiable things related of him by others.
This strain of thought brought to his mind a call he once made with a
letter of introduction, when a youth in Paris, upon Jules Janin. The
servant said her master was at home, and he was ushered immediately
into a small parlor, in one corner of which was a winding stairway
leading into the room above.
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