Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SIX SONNETS FROM LONGFELLOW' TO approach Longfellow, the most popular of American poets, as a sonneteer is to suggest the rectification of the order of excellence in which his poems have been placed, and to put at the front the work which makes his fame secure. A poet of grace and sentiment, a lover of the domestic virtues and endowed with that courage of affection born of simplicity and sincerity to which the cynics are strangers, the author of "The Voices of the Night" had the cup of popular applause held tohis lips early and late; but although a scholar and the companion of scholars, and dear to not a few with whom the plaudits of the hour are counted things of naught, there were always dissenters and unbelievers among the critics, and his death was followed by a period of indifference or derogation. The over-praise and the under-valuation will be equally void of weight when the final summing up is made and the final judgment announced. Meantime Longfellow will continue to be loved and memorized; for he who sows year after year in the hearts of children will always reap an abundant harvest. Longfellow was not of the great ones; nor, for that matter, are the vast majority of the singers whom the world has agreed not to forget. He wrote a good deal of rhymed commonplace; and so, for that matter, did Wordsworth, Byron, Schiller, Whittier. Time has already edited Wordsworth and Byron; it will edit Longfellow. When this work of critical selection has been completed, there will remain a volume of verse, distinctly American, and genuinely poetic and melodious, not as Beethoven and Brahms are melodious, but as Mendelssohn and Schubert are melodious. 1 These sonnets are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of ...