=LONGFELLOW AND THE CHILDREN=

BY LUCY LARCOM

The poets who love children are the poets whom children love. It is
natural that they should care much for each other, because both children
and poets look into things in the same way,--simply, with open eyes and
hearts, seeing Nature as it is, and finding whatever is lovable and pure
in the people who surround them, as flowers may receive back from
flowers sweet odors for those which they have given. The little child is
born with a poet's heart in him, and the poet has been fitly called "the
eternal child."

Not that all children or all poets are alike in this. But of Longfellow
we think as of one who has always been fresh and natural in his sympathy
for children, one who has loved them as they have loved him.

We wish he had given us more of the memories of his own childhood. One
vivid picture of it comes to us in "My Lost Youth," a poem which shows
us how everything he saw when a child must have left within him a
life-long impression. That boyhood by the sea must have been full of
dreams as well as of pictures. The beautiful bay with its green islands,
widening out to the Atlantic on the east, and the dim chain of
mountains, the highest in New England, lying far away on the
northwestern horizon, give his native city a roomy feeling not often
experienced in the streets of a town; and the boy-poet must have felt
his imagination taking wings there, for many a long flight. So he more
than hints to us in his song:

"I can see the shadowy lines of its trees,