Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,
who pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while the
reflections were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how
"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the free
forest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not
then know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to
meet one later, in the "Kalewala." But, at that time, one had no
conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse as
Scott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces. The pleasure and
enchantment of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,
when one read for the first time--
"So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a child I
was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands where we
chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like Sir Walter
Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like Sir Walter
Scott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the books in an
ancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I found
Tupper, and could not get on with "Proverbial Philosophy." Next I tried
Tennyson, and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music was
audible, a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be
dethroned.
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