In some respects it has been an advantage to Longfellow
that he was born an American. In growing up under a state
of society alien to that which had coloured the thoughts of the



' POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 361

sighteenth-century poets, he was in a great degree withdrawn
from their influence. His thoughts were, therefore, left to
clothe themselves in their own natural dress. They are never
dominated by expression. In this respect, he is the most natural
poet of the age. The entirely modern elements of the society
by which he was surrounded, threw out the mediaeval world in
all its freshness before him. Its chivalries, its childlike faith,
its cultivation of the ascetic virtues, its weird superstitions, its
ceremonial pageantries, appeared to him in more startling con-
trast, with the selfish pursuits of commerce, with the coarsening
influence of scepticism, with the material results of industrial
development, than to a European observer. Longfellow wan-
dered through such old towns as Bruges, Nismes, and Bologna,
where the architecture and traditions of the mediaeval age are
still rife; or through the castellated cities on the Rhine, where
its baronial feuds speak out from each topaz cliff and ruined
turret, much with the same feeling as a European scholar paces
the banks of the Cephissus or the Capitoline Mount. He saw
nothing, in these phantom relics of the past, but its poetry. He
was not tutored in a state of society, in which the mediaeval
world had left institutions side by side with modern creations,
to stifle social. development in its growth, as the ivy, with its
parasitical weeds, hampers the growth of a new plant. He was,
therefore, in a position to appreciate their humanizing elements,
without feeling a taste of the miasma which they exhale,
where they exist in a stage of social decrepitude. He, accord-
ingly, took the mediaeval gauge of the spiritual, as the actual
framework of the phenomenal world, and loved to hang his
pictures in it. 