His second wife died on July 1 o, 1861, as the result of a tragic accident, and the poem of Longfellow's which is most successful in conveying the effect of deep emotion, his Cross of Snow, resulted from this bereavement. He did not print it ; he seems always to have felt that frank expression of his personal feeling was not for the public eye. In 1868 he went to Europe, where he was hailed as a celebrity. Among the honours conferred on him were degrees of LL.D. from Cambridge and D.C.L. from Oxford, and election to membership in the Royal Spanish Academy. He died on March 24, 1882, and in 1884 a memorial to him was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. He was the first American poet to be commemorated there.
His fame in his own day was greater than that attained by any American poet prior to his time. It was based on the extraordinary popularity of his work, which was read not only by all classes in the United States but generally in England, and was translated into many languages to meet the demand for it in other countries.
Longfellow's kindliness and charm, his unfailing generosity to ward the thousands who visited his house in Cambridge, besieged him with requests for autographs, and heaped his desk with correspondence, contributed toward making him a national hero.
Longfellow's facility in remembering and reproducing what he had read gives an imitative quality and a too bookish flavour to much of his verse, though he was never the downright plagiarist Poe called him. But, though his writing rarely reflects current American concerns and though he cherished the romantic past, he believed definitely that there should be a truly American liter ature, not distinguished by its mere difference from English but by its authors' willingness to write "naturally, to write from their own feelings and impressions, from the influence of what they see around them." He was a good story-teller, and this has endeared
him to children and to beginners in the appreciation of poetry.
Longfellow is still probably as much read as any American poet, even by those who do not come to know his verse in school. Barred from the company of the few great universal poets of the world, his work has virtues which are not ordinarily found in the merely mediocre. Much is summed up in the words of William Dean Howells, who refused to prophesy as to Longfellow's future place in literature, but remarked, "I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets." the Riverside edition of Longfellow's Works (Boston, 1886). The most complete biography is Samuel Longfellow's Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence (Boston, 1891). For bibliography see L. S. Living ston, Bibliography of the . . . Writings of Henry Wadsworth Long fellow (1908). Of the shorter biographies that by T. W. Higginson (1902) is the best ; H. S. Gorman's A Victorian American (1926), the most recent. P. Morin's Les Sources de l'Oeuvre de Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1913) is a useful study. For a friend's description of the poet, see W. D. Howell's Literary Friends and Acquaintance (5900). Brief essays and criticisms are numerous; see, for example, Paul Elmer More in Shelburne Essays, vol. v. (1908) ; • Bliss Perry in Park Street Papers (Boston, 1908) ; and his "Longfellow and Hawthorne" in Bowdoin College Bulletin (Sept. 1925) ; E. C. Stedman in Poets of America (Boston, 1885) ; and W. P. Trent in Longfellow and Other Essays (Iwo). (K. B. M.)