did not perceive that the public, and even the performers, had left him alone in the theatre until he reached the end of an act.

Hagen notes that originality is the quality that distinguishes genius from talent. And Jurgen-Meyer: "The imagination of talent reproduces the stated fact; the inspiration of genius makes it anew. The first disengages or repeats; the second invents or creates. Talent aims at a point which appears difficult to reach; genius aims at a point which no one perceives. The novelty, it must be understood, resides not in the elements, but in their shock." Novelty and grandeur are the two chief characters which Bettinelli attributes to genius; "for this reason," he says, "poets call themselves troubadours or trouvères." Cardan conceived the idea of the education of deaf mutes before Harriot; he caught a glimpse of the application of algebra to geometry and geometric constructions before Descartes. Giordano Bruno divined the modern theories of cosmology and of the origin of ideas. Cola di Rienzi conceived Italian unity, with Rome as capital, four hundred years before Cavour and Mazzini. Stoppani admits that the geological theory of Dante, with the regard to the formation of seas, is at all points in accordance with the accepted ideas of to-day.

Genius divines facts before completely knowing them; thus Goethe described Italy very well before knowing it; and Schiller, the land and people of Switzerland, without having been. there. And it is on account of those divinations which all precede common observation, and because genius, occupied with lofty researches, does not possess the habits of the many, and because, like the lunatic and unlike the man of talent, he is often disordered, the man of genius is scorned and misunderstood. Ordinary persons do not perceive the steps which have led the man of genius to his creation, but they see the difference between his conclusions and those of others, and the strangeness of his conduct. Rossini's "Barbiere," and Beethoven's "Fidelio" were received with hisses; Boito's "Mefistofele" and Wagner's "Lohengrin" have been hissed at Milan. How many academicians have smiled compassionately at Marzolo, who has dis. covered a new philosophic world! Bolyai, for his invention of the fourth dimension in anti-Euclidian geometry, has been called the geometrician of the insane, and compared to a miller who wishes to make flour of sand. Every one knows the treatment accorded to Fulton and Columbus and Papin, and, in our own days, to

Piatti and Praga and Abel, and to Schliemann, who found Ilium, where no one else had dreamed of looking for it, while learned academicians laughed. "There never was a liberal idea," wrote Flaubert," which has not been unpopular; never an act of justice which has not caused scandal; never a great man who has not been pelted with potatoes or struck by knives. The history of human intellect is the history of human stupidity,' as M. de Voltaire said."

In this persecution, men of genius have no fiercer or more terrible enemies than the men of academies, who possess the weapons of talent, the stimulus of vanity, and the prestige by preference accorded to them by the vulgar, and by governments which, in large part, consist of the vulgar. There are, indeed, countries in which the ordinary level of intelligence sinks so low that the inhabitants come to hate, not only genius, but even talent.

From "The Man of Genius.»

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

(1807-1882)

F THE ability to express the best and most helpful thoughts that are common to humanity in all ages and countries, and

to make this expression so lucid, so simple, so truthful, that those who most need to be helped by it are reached, influenced, and elevated-if to do this is the highest work of the poet, then Longfellow's sphere of usefulness in poetry is higher and more nearly universal than that of any other poet who has written English verse during the nineteenth century. In what may be classed as the peculiar qualities of genius, he may not rank with Byron, with Shelley, or even with Tennyson or Swinburne in England, or with Poe and Lanier in America. But his usefulness is incomparably greater in America than that of any other poet of his century. He is peculiarly the poet of the home and the favorite of all those who prefer for themselves, or for those they wish to influence, an assured future of quiet usefulness rather than an uncertain and feverish life of that spasmodic admiration which the world bestows only on the extraordinary or the abnormal. The quiet stream which, beginning as a cold and pellucid brook flowing from the melting snows of some lofty mountain peak, gathers volume and increasing warmth in the lowlands until, without losing its native purity and clarity, it swells at last to a noble river, fertilizing wide areas of wood and field, of orchard and garden where grain and fruit and flowers in profusion and in beauty cheer the eye and delight the heart as a result of its fructifying influences - this is the type of the usefulness of Longfellow as a poet, as a benefactor of his own country, as a friend of universal humanity.

That he was one of the greatest scholars of New England, as well as its greatest poet, is a fact which his own modesty left unasserted. But no one who attempts to follow him where his traces are obvious, through the literature of the classical, mediæval, and modern period, will doubt the extent of his industry or the thoroughness of his scholarship. As a prose writer he has an unpretentious and lucid style of direct statement which is always admirable in its spirit, and seldom at fault in its expression. His prose in the essays he has prefixed to "The Poets and Poetry of Europe," in his "Hyperion," and "Outre-Mer» ranks with the very best prose of its class written in

America, and it is essentially superior both in idea and expression to the best work of the members of Longfellow's own literary circle, who made prose writing much more a specialty that he ever attempted to do. If it were not that his use of German hexameter in his "Evangeline" is still under discussion, it might be said without danger of dispute that he did his best work in everything he attempted, and that he did even his worst work well. It is true when all is said that «< Evangeline" » is an admirable poem, worthy of its theme and of its author, though its mode is that of Voss rather than of Homer. When all has been admitted that can be truly said in depreciation of Longfellow, his work remains still unimpeached, to testify that there is no higher name in the American literature of the nineteenth century. He was born at Portland, Maine, February 27th, 1807. After graduating at Bowdoin College in 1825, he spent between two and three years in Europe, returning to become professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin (1829-1835). After a second visit to Europe he became professor of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres at Harvard, where he remained eighteen years, retiring in 1854 and continuing to reside at Cambridge, where he devoted himself to literature. His poems were widely circulated in England, and many of them have been translated into German and other continental languages. He died March 24th, 1882, after a life so placid that but for his deep sorrow at the loss of his wife it might have been redeemed wholly from that pathetic element which so frequently excites, if it does not occasion, poetic genius. The placidity of his life which re-appears in his verse has been the chief occasion for the charge of commonplaceness brought against him. But it is illogical to the last degree to confound the peaceful with the commonplace. The spirit of peace is as rare in poetry as it is in life, and it is Longfellow's greatest glory that his work expresses it.

W. V. B.

ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE AND POETRY

READ in history that the beauty of an ancient manuscript

W tempted King Alfred, when a boy at his mother's knee,

to learn the letters of the Saxon tongue. A volume which that monarch minstrel wrote in after years now lies before me so beautifully printed that it might tempt any one to learn, not only the letters of the Saxon language, but the language also. The monarch himself is looking from the ornamental initial letter of the first chapter. He is crowned and careworn; having a beard, and long, flowing locks, and a face of majesty.

He seems to have just uttered those remarkable words, with which his preface closes: "And now he prays, and for God's name implores, every one of those whom it lists to read this book, that he would pray for him, and not blame him, if he more rightly understand it than he could; for every man must, according to the measure of his understanding, and according to his leisure, speak that which he speaks, and do that which he does."

I would fain hope that the beauty of this and other AngloSaxon books may lead many to the study of that venerable language. Through such gateways will they pass, it is true, into no gay palace of song; but among the dark chambers and moldering walls of an old national literature, all weather-stained and in ruins. They will find, however, venerable names recorded on those walls; and inscriptions, worth the trouble of deciphering. To point out the most curious and important of these is my present purpose; and according to the measure of my understanding, and according to my leisure, I speak that which I speak.

The Anglo-Saxon language was the language of our Saxon forefathers in England, though they never gave it that name. They called it English. Thus King Alfred speaks of translating "from book-latin into English" (of bec Ledene on Englisc); Abbot Ælfric was requested by Ethelward "to translate the book of Genesis from Latin into English" (anwendan of Ledene on Englisc tha boc Genesis); and Bishop Leofric, speaking of the manuscript he gave to the Exeter Cathedral, calls it "a great English book" (mycel Englisc boc). In other words, it is the old Saxon, a Gothic tongue, as spoken and developed in England. That it was spoken and written uniformly throughout the land is not to be imagined, when we know that Jutes and Angles were in the country as well as Saxons. But that it was essentially the same language everywhere is not to be doubted, when we compare pure West Saxon texts with Northumbrian glosses and books of Durham. Hickes speaks of a Dano-Saxon period in the history of the language. The Saxon kings reigned six hundred years; the Danish dynasty, twenty only. And neither the Danish boors, who were earthlings (prthlingas) in the country, nor the Danish soldiers, who were dandies at the court of King Canute, could, in the brief space of twenty years, have so overlaid or interlarded the pure Anglo-Saxon with their provin