Chapter IX: History (5)

The various writers whose opinions have been briefly discussed agree in supposing that there is a normal specific longevity, although Metchnikoff alone has urged that this differs markedly from the average longevity, and has propounded a theory of the causes of the divergence. It is common ground that they believe the organism to be wound up, so to say, for a definite period, but have no very definite theory as to how this period is determined. A. Weismann, on the other hand, in a well-known essay on the duration of life, has developed a theory to explain the various fashions in which the gift of life is measured out to different kinds of creatures. He accepts the position that purely physiological conditions set a limit to the number of years that can be attained by each kind of multicellular organism, but holds that these conditions leave room for a considerable amount of variation. Duration of life, in fact, according to Weismann, is a character that can be influenced by the environment and that by a process of natural selection can be adapted to the conditions of existence of different species.

If a species is to maintain its existence or to increase, it is obvious that its members must be able to replace the losses caused by death. It is necessary, moreover, for the success of the species, that an average population of full vigour should be maintained. Weismann argues that death itself is an adaptation to secure the removal of useless and worn-out individuals and that it comes as soon as may be after the period of reproductive activity. It is understood that the term reproductive activity covers not merely the production of new individuals but the care of these by the parents until they are self-sufficient. The average longevity, according to Weismann, is adapted to the needs of the species; it is sufficiently long to secure that the requisite number of new individuals is produced and protected. He has brought together a large number of instances which show that there is a relation between duration of life and fertility. Birds of prey, which breed slowly, usually producing an annual brood of no more than one or two, live to great ages, whilst rabbits which produce large litters at frequent intervals have relatively short lives. Allowance has to be made in cases where the young are largely preyed upon by enemies, for this counteracts the effect of high fecundity. In short, the duration of life is so adapted that a pair of individuals on the average succeed in rearing a pair of offspring. Metchnikoff, however, has pointed out that the longevity of such fecund creatures must have arisen independently, as otherwise species subject to high risks of this nature would have ceased to exist and would have disappeared, as many species have vanished in the past of the world's history.

The normal specific longevity, the age to which all normal individuals of a species would survive under the most favourable conditions, must depend on constitution and structure. No doubt selection is involved, as it is obvious that creatures would perish if their constitution and structure were not such that they could live long enough to reproduce their kind. The direct explanation, however, must be sought for in size, complexity of structure, length of period of growth, capacity to withstand the wear and tear of life and such other intrinsic qualities. The average specific longevity, on the other hand, depends on a multitude of extrinsic conditions operating on the intrinsic constitution; these extrinsic conditions are given by the environment of the species as it affects the young and the adults, enemies, diseases, abundance of food, climatic conditions and so forth. It would seem most natural to suppose that in all cases, except perhaps those of intelligent man and the domestic animals or plants he harbours, the average longevity must vary enormously with changing conditions, and must be a factor of greater importance in the survival of the species than the ideal normal specific longevity. It also seems more probable that the reproductive capacity, which is extremely variable, has been adapted to the average longevity of the species, than that, as Weismann supposed, it should itself be the determining cause of the duration of life.

REFERENCES.--G. L. L. Buffon, _Histoire naturelle générale et
particulière_, vol. ii. (Paris, 1749); Y. Bunge, _Archiv. f. die
gesammte Physiologie_, vol. xcv. (Bonn, 1903); M. J. P. Flourens, _De
la longévité humaine et de la quantité de vie sur le globe_ (Paris,
1855); J. H. Gurney, _On the Comparative Ages to which Birds live_,
_Ibis_, p. 19 (1899); Sir E. Ray Lankester, _Comparative Longevity in
Man and the Lower Animals_ (London, 1870); E. Metchnikoff, _The
Prolongation of Life_ (London, 1908); M. Oustalet, _La Nature_, p. 378
(1900); A. Weismann, _Essays upon Heredity_ (Oxford, 1889). (P. C. M.)

LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH (1807-1882), American poet, was born on the 27th of February 1807, at Portland, Maine. His ancestor, William Longfellow, had immigrated to Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1676, from Yorkshire, England. His father was Stephen Longfellow, a lawyer and United States congressman, and his mother, Zilpha Wadsworth, a descendant of John Alden and of "Priscilla, the Puritan maiden."

Longfellow's external life presents little that is of stirring interest. It is the life of a modest, deep-hearted gentleman, whose highest ambition was to be a perfect man, and, through sympathy and love, to help others to be the same. His boyhood was spent mostly in his native town, which he never ceased to love, and whose beautiful surroundings and quiet, pure life he has described in his poem "My Lost Youth." Here he grew up in the midst of majestic peace, which was but once broken, and that by an event which made a deep impression on him--the war of 1812. He never forgot

"the sea-fight far away.
How it thundered o'er the tide.
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay.
Where they in battle died."

The "tranquil bay" is Casco Bay, one of the most beautiful in the world, studded with bold, green islands, well fitted to be the Hesperides of a poet's boyish dreams. At the age of fifteen Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at Brunswick, a town situated near the romantic falls of the Androscoggin river, about 25 m. from Portland, and in a region full of Indian scenery and legend. Here he had among his classfellows Nathaniel Hawthorne, George B. Cheever and J. S. C. Abbott. During the latter years of his college life he contributed to the _United States Literary Gazette_ some half-dozen poems, which are interesting for two reasons--(1) as showing the poet's early, book-mediated sympathy with nature and legendary heroisms, and (2) as being almost entirely free from that supernatural view of nature which his subsequent residence in Europe imparted to him. He graduated in 1825, at the age of eighteen, with honours, among others that of writing the "class poem"--taking the fourth place in a class of thirty-eight. He then entered his father's law office, without intending, however, it would appear, to devote himself to the study of the law. For this profession he was, both by capacity and tastes, utterly unfitted, and it was fortunate that, shortly after his graduation, he received an offer of a professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin College. In order the better to qualify himself for this appointment, he went to Europe (May 15th, 1826) and spent three years and a half travelling in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland and England, learning languages, for which he had unusual talent, and drinking in the spirit of the history and life of these countries. The effect of Longfellow's visit was twofold. On the one hand, it widened his sympathies, gave him confidence in himself and supplied him with many poetical themes; on the other, it traditionalized his mind, coloured for him the pure light of nature and rendered him in some measure unfit to feel or express the spirit of American nature and life. His sojourn in Europe fell exactly in the time when, in England, the reaction against the sentimental atheism of Shelley, the pagan sensitivity of Keats, and the sublime, Satanic outcastness of Byron was at its height; when, in the Catholic countries, the negative exaggerations of the French Revolution were inducing a counter current of positive faith, which threw men into the arms of a half-sentimental, half-aesthetic medievalism; and when, in Germany, the aristocratic paganism of Goethe was being swept aside by that tide of dutiful, romantic patriotism which flooded the country, as soon as it began to feel that it still existed after being run over by Napoleon's war-chariot. He returned to America in 1829, and remained six years at Bowdoin College (1829-1835), during which he published various text-books for the study of modern languages. In his twenty-fourth year (1831) he married Miss Mary Story Potter, one of his "early loves." In 1833 he made a series of translations from the Spanish, with an essay on the moral and devotional poetry of Spain, and these were incorporated in 1835 in _Outre-mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea_.

In 1835 Longfellow was chosen to succeed George Ticknor as professor of modern languages and belles-lettres in Harvard. On receiving this appointment, he paid a second visit of some fifteen months to Europe, this time devoting special attention to the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. During this visit he lost his wife, who died at Rotterdam, on the 29th of November 1835.

On his return to America in December 1836, Longfellow took up his residence in Cambridge, and began to lecture at Harvard and to write. In his new home he found himself amid surroundings entirely congenial to him. Its spaciousness and free rural aspect, its old graveyards and towering elms, its great university, its cultivated society and its vicinity to humane, substantial, busy Boston, were all attractions for such a man. In 1837-1838 several essays of Longfellow's appeared in the _North American Review_, and in 1839 he published _Hyperion: a Romance_, and his first volume of original poetry, entitled _Voices of the Night_. _Hyperion_, a poetical account of his travels, had, at the time of its publication, an immense popularity, due mainly to its sentimental romanticism. At present few persons beyond their teens would care to read it through, so unnatural and stilted is its language, so thin its material and so consciously mediated its sentiment. Nevertheless it has a certain historical importance, for two reasons--(1) because it marks that period in Longfellow's career when, though he had left nature, he had not yet found art, and (2) because it opened the sluices through which the flood of German sentimental poetry flowed into the United States. The _Voices of the Night_ contains some of his best minor poems, e.g. "The Psalm of Life" and "Footsteps of Angels." In 1842 Longfellow published a small volume of _Ballads and other Poems_, containing some of his most popular pieces, e.g. "The Skeleton in Armour," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," "The Village Blacksmith," "To a Child," "The Bridge," "Excelsior." In the same year he paid a third brief visit to Europe, spending the summer on the Rhine. During his return-passage across the Atlantic he wrote his _Poems on Slavery_ (1842), with a dedication to Channing. These poems went far to wake in the youth of New England a sense of the great national wrong, and to prepare them for that bitter struggle in which it was wiped out at the expense of the lives of so many of them. In 1843 he married again, his wife being Miss Frances Elizabeth Appleton of Boston, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, one of the founders of Lowell, and a sister of Thomas G. Appleton, himself no mean poet.

About the same time he bought, and fixed his residence in, the Craigie House, where he had formerly only been a lodger, an old "revolutionary house," built about the beginning of the 18th century, and occupied by General Washington in 1776. This quaint old wooden house, in the midst of a large garden full of splendid elms, continued to be his chief residence till the day of his death. Of the lectures on Dante which he delivered about this time, James Russell Lowell says: "These lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full significance of the great Christian poet." Indeed, as a professor, Longfellow was eminently successful. Shortly after the _Poems on Slavery_, there appeared in 1843 a more ambitious work, _The Spanish Student, a Play in Three Acts_, a kind of sentimental "Morality," without any special merit but good intention. If published nowadays it would hardly attract notice; but in those gushing, emotion-craving times it had considerable popularity, and helped to increase the poet's now rapidly widening fame. A huge collection of translations of foreign poetry edited by him, and entitled _The Poets and Poetry of Europe_, appeared in 1845, and, in 1846, a few minor poems--songs and sonnets--under the title _The Belfry of Bruges_. In 1847 he published at Boston the greatest of all his works, _Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie_. It was, in some degree, an imitation of Goethe's _Hermann and Dorothea_, and its plot, which was derived from Hawthorne's _American Note-Books_, is even simpler than that of the German poem, not to say much more touching. At the violent removal by the British government of a colony of French settlers from Acadie (Nova Scotia) in 1755, a young couple, on the very day of their wedding, were separated and carried in different directions, so that they lost all trace of each other. The poem describes the wanderings of the bride in search of her lover, and her final discovery of him as an old man on his death-bed, in a public hospital which she had entered as a nurse. Slight as the story is, it is worked out into one of the most affecting poems in the language, and gives to literature one of its most perfect types of womanhood and of "affection that hopes and endures and is patient." Though written in a metre deemed foreign to English ears, the poem immediately attained a wide popularity, which it has never lost, and secured to the dactylic hexameter a recognized place among English metres.

In 1849 Longfellow published a novel of no great merit, _Kavanagh_, and also a volume of poems entitled _The Seaside and the Fireside_, a title which has reference to his two homes, the seaside one on the charming peninsula of Nahant, the fireside one in Cambridge. One of the poems in this collection, "Resignation," has taken a permanent place in literature; another, "Hymn for my Brother's Ordination," shows plainly the nature of the poet's Christianity. His brother, the Rev. Samuel Longfellow, was a minister of the Unitarian Church.

Longfellow's genius, in its choice of subjects, always oscillated between America and Europe, between the colonial period of American history and the Middle and Romantic Ages of European feeling. When tired of the broad daylight of American activity, he sought refuge and rest in the dim twilight of medieval legend and German sentiment. In 1851 appeared _The Golden Legend_, a long lyric drama based upon Hartmann von Aue's beautiful story of self-sacrifice, _Der arme Heinrich_. Next to _Evangeline_, this is at once the best and the most popular of the poet's longer works, and contains many passages of great beauty. Bringing his imagination back to America, he next applied himself to the elaboration of an Indian legend. In 1854 he resigned his professorship. In the following year he gave to the world the Indian Edda, _The Song of Hiawatha_, a conscious imitation, both in subject and metre, of the Finnish epic, the _Kalevala_, with which he had become acquainted during his second visit to Europe. The metre is monotonous and easily ridiculed, but it suits the subject, and the poem is very popular. In 1858 appeared _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, based on a charming incident in the early history of the Plymouth colony, and, along with it, a number of minor poems, included under the modest title, _Birds of Passage_. One of these is "My Lost Youth."

Two events now occurred which served to cast a gloom over the poet's life and to interrupt his activity,--the outbreak of the Civil war, and the tragic fate of his wife, who, having accidentally allowed her dress to catch fire, was burnt to death in her own house in 1861. It was long before he recovered from the shock caused by this terrible event, and in his subsequent published poems he never ventured even to allude to it. When he did in some measure find himself again, he gave to the world his charming _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ (1863), and in 1865 his _Household Poems_. Among the latter is a poem entitled "The Children's Hour," which affords a glance into the home life of the widowed poet, who had been left with five children--two sons, Ernest and Charles, and three daughters,

"Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair."

A small volume entitled _Flower de Luce_ (1867) contains, among other fine things, the beautiful "threnos" on the burial of Hawthorne, and "The Bells of Lynn." Once more the poet sought refuge in medieval life by completing his translation of the _Divina Commedia_, parts of which he had rendered into English as much as thirty years before. This work appeared in 1867, and gave a great impulse to the study of Dante in America. It is a masterpiece of literal translation. Next came the _New England Tragedies_ (1868) and _The Divine Tragedy_ (1871), which found no large public. In 1868-1869 the poet visited Europe, and was everywhere received with the greatest honour. In 1872 appeared _Three Books of Song_, containing translated as well as original pieces, in 1873 _Aftermath_ and in 1875 _The Mask of Pandora, and other Poems_. Among these "other poems" were "The Hanging of the Crane," "Morituri Salutamus" and "A Book of Sonnets." _The Mask of Pandora_ is a proof of that growing appreciation of pagan naturalism which marked the poet's later years. Though not a great poem, it is full of beautiful passages, many of which point to the riddle of life as yet unsolved, a conviction which grew ever more and more upon the poet, as the ebulliency of romanticism gave way to the calm of classic feeling. In the "Book of Sonnets" are some of the finest things he ever wrote, especially the five sonnets entitled "Three Friends of Mine." These "three friends" were Cornelius Felton, Louis Agassiz and Charles Sumner, whom he calls

"The noble three,
Who half my life were more than friends to me."

The loss of Agassiz was a blow from which he never entirely recovered; and, when Sumner also left him, he wrote:--

"Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn."

He did stay a little longer; but the embers that still burnt in him refused to be covered up. He would fain have ceased writing, and used to say, "It's a great thing to know when to stop"; but he could not stop, and did not stop, till the last. He continued to publish from time to time, in the magazines, poems which showed a clearness of vision and a perfection of workmanship such as he never had equalled at any period of his life. Indeed it may be said that his finest poems were his last. Of these a small collection appeared under the title of _Keramos, and other Poems_ (1878). Besides these, in the years 1875-1878 he edited a collection of _Poems of Places_ in thirty-one small volumes. In 1880 appeared _Ultima Thule_, meant to be his last work, and it was nearly so. In October 1881 he wrote a touching sonnet on the death of President Garfield, and in January 1882, when the hand of death was already upon him, his poem, _Hermes Trismegistus_, in which he gives utterance, in language as rich as that of the early gods, to that strange feeling of awe without fear, and hope without form, with which every man of spotless life and upright intellect withdraws from the phenomena of time to the realities of eternity.

In the last years of his life he suffered a great deal from rheumatism, and was, as he sometimes cheerfully said, "never free from pain." Still he remained as sunny and genial as ever, looking from his Cambridge study windows across the Brighton meadows to the Brookline hills, or enjoying the "free wild winds of the Atlantic," and listening to "The Bells of Lynn" in his Nahant home. He still continued to receive all visitors, and to take occasional runs up to Castine and Portland, the homes of his family. About the beginning of 1882, however, a serious change took place in his condition. Dizziness and want of strength confined him to his room for some time, and, although after some weeks he partially recovered, his elasticity and powers were gone. On the 19th of March he was seized with what proved to be peritonitis, and he died on the 24th. The poet was buried two days afterwards near his "three friends" in Mount Auburn cemetery. The regret for his loss was universal; for no modern man was ever better loved or better deserved to be loved.

Longfellow was made an LL.D. of Bowdoin College in 1828, at the age of twenty-one, of Harvard in 1859 and of Cambridge (England) in 1868, and D.C.L. of Oxford in 1869. In 1873 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Science, and in 1877 of the Spanish Academy.

In person, Longfellow was rather below middle height, broad shouldered and well built. His head and face were extremely handsome, his forehead broad and high, his eyes full of clear, warming fire, his nose straight and graceful, his chin and lips rich and full of feeling as those of the Praxitelean Hermes, and his voice low, melodious and full of tender cadences. His hair, originally dark, became, in his later years, silvery white, and its wavy locks combined with those of his flowing beard to give him that leonine appearance so familiar through his later portraits. Charles Kingsley said of Longfellow's face that it was the most beautiful human face he had ever seen. A bust to his memory was erected in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1884.

In Longfellow, the poet was the flower and fruit of the man. His
nature was essentially poetic, and his life the greatest of his poems.
Those who knew only the poems he wrote could form but a faint notion
of the harmony, the sweetness, the manliness and the tenderness of
that which he lived. What he would have been as a poet, if, instead of
visiting Europe in early life and drinking in the spirit of the middle
ages under the shadows of cathedral towers, he had, like Whittier,
grown old amid American scenery and life, we can only guess from his
earlier poems, which are as naturalistic, fresh and unmystical as
could be desired; but certain it is that, from his long familiarity
with the medieval view of nature, and its semi-pagan offspring, the
romantic view, he was brought, for the greater part of his life, to
look upon the world of men and things either as the middle scene of a
miracle play, with a heaven of rewarding happiness above and a
purgatory of purifying pain below, or else as a garment concealing,
while it revealed, spiritual forms of unfathomed mystery. During this
time he could hear "the trailing garments of the night sweep through
her marble halls," and see "the stars come out to listen to the music
of the seas." Later on, as he approached his second youth (he was
spared a second childhood), he tended to a more pagan view. About the
time when he was writing _The Mask of Pandora_, he could see "in the
sunset Jason's fleece of gold," and hear "the waves of the distracted
sea piteously calling and lamenting" his lost friend. But through all
the periods of his life his view of the world was essentially
religious and subjective, and, consequently, his manner of dealing
with it hymnal or lyric. This fact, even more than his merits as an
artist, serves to account for his immense popularity. Too
well-informed, too appreciative and too modest to deem himself the
peer of the "grand old masters," or one of "those far stars that come
in sight once in a century," he made it his aim to write something
that should "make a purer faith and manhood shine in the untutored
heart," and to do this in the way that should best reach that heart.
This aim determined at once his choice of subjects and his mode of
treating them.

The subjects of Longfellow's poetry are, for the most part, aspects of
nature as influencing human feeling, either directly or through
historical association, the tender or pathetic sides and incidents of
life, or heroic deeds preserved in legend or history. He had a special
fondness for records of human devotion and self-sacrifice, whether
they were monkish legends, Indian tales, Norse _drápas_ or bits of
American history. His mode of treatment is subjective and lyric. No
matter what form his works assume, whether the epic, as in Evangeline,
_The Courtship of Miles Standish_ and _Hiawatha_, the dramatic, as in
_The Spanish Student_, _The Golden Legend_ and _The Mask of Pandora_,
or the didactic, as in _The Psalm of Life_ and many of the minor
poems; they are all subjective. This is not the highest praise that
can be given to works of art; but it implies less dispraise in
Longfellow's case than in almost any other, by reason of his noble
subjectivity.

If we look in Longfellow's poetry for originality of thought, profound
psychological analysis or new insights into nature, we shall be
disappointed. Though very far from being hampered by any dogmatic
philosophical or religious system of the past, his mind, until near
the end, found sufficient satisfaction in the Christian view of life
to make it indifferent to the restless, inquiring spirit of the
present, and disinclined to play with any more recent solution of
life's problems. He had no sympathy with either scepticism or formal
dogmatism, and no need to hazard rash guesses respecting man's
destiny. He disliked the psychological school of art, believing it to
be essentially morbid and unhealthy. He had no sympathy with the
tendency represented by George Eliot, or with any attempt to be
analytic in art. He held art to be essentially synthetic, creative and
manifesting, not analytic, destructive or questioning. Hence he never
strove to draw from nature some new secret, or to show in her
relations never discovered before. His aim was to impress upon her
familiar facts and aspects the seal of his own gracious nature. A man
in intellect and courage, yet without conceit or bravado; a woman in
sensibility and tenderness, yet without shrinking or weakness; a saint
in purity of life and devotion of heart, yet without asceticism or
religiosity; a knight-errant in hatred of wrong and contempt of
baseness, yet without self-righteousness or cynicism; a prince in
dignity and courtesy, yet without formality or condescension; a poet
in thought and feeling, yet without jealousy or affectation; a scholar
in tastes and habits, yet without aloofness or bookishness; a dutiful
son, a loving husband, a judicious father, a trusty friend, a useful
citizen and an enthusiastic patriot,--he united in his strong,
transparent humanity almost every virtue under heaven. A thoroughly
healthy, well-balanced, harmonious nature, accepting life as it came,
with all its joys and sorrows, and living it beautifully and
hopefully, without canker and without uncharity. No man ever lived
more completely in the light than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Perhaps the most remarkable traits in Longfellow's character were his
accessibility and his charity. Though a great worker, he seemed always
to have time for anything he was asked to do. He was never too busy to
see a caller, to answer a letter, or to assist, by word or deed, any
one that needed assistance. His courtesy to all visitors, even to
strangers and children who called to look at him, or who, not
venturing to call, hung about his garden-gate in order to catch a
glimpse of him, was almost a marvel. He always took it for granted
that they had come to see Washington's study, and, accordingly, took
the greatest interest in showing them that. He never, as long as he
could write, was known to refuse his autograph, and so far was he from
trying to protect himself from intruders that he rarely drew the
blinds of his study windows at night, though that study was on the
ground floor and faced the street. His acts of charity, though
performed in secret, were neither few nor small. Of him it may be
said with perfect truth, "He went about doing good"; and not with his
money merely, but also with his presence and his encouragement. To how
many sad hearts did he come like an angel, with the rich tones of his
voice waking harmonics of hope, where before there had been despair
and silence? How many young literary people, disappointed at the
unsuccess of their first attempts, did he comfort and spur on to
renewed and higher efforts! How careful he was to quench no smoking
flax! How utterly free he was from jealousy or revengefulness! While
poor, morbid Edgar Allan Poe was writing violent and scurrilous
articles upon him, accusing him of plagiarism and other literary
misdemeanours, he was delivering enthusiastic lectures to his classes
on Poe's poetry. His charity was unbounded. Once, when the present
writer proposed to the president of the Harvard University Visiting
Committee that Longfellow should be placed on that committee, the
president replied: "What would be the use? Longfellow could never be
brought to find fault with anybody or anything." And it was true. His
whole life was bathed in that sympathy, that love which suffers long
and envies not, which forgives unto seventy times seven times, and as
many more if need be. Even in his last years, when loss of friends and
continual physical pain made life somewhat "cold, and dark and dreary"
for him, he never complained, lamented or blamed the arrangements of
nature, and the only way in which it was possible to know that he
suffered was through his ever-increasing delight in the health and
strength of younger men. His whole nature was summed up in the lines
of his favourite poet:--

"Luce intellettual, piena d'amore.
Amor di vero ben, pien di letizia.
Letizia che trascende ogni dolzore."

See his _Life ... with Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence_,
by Samuel Longfellow, and the "Riverside" edition of the prose and
poems (Boston, 11 vols., 1886-1890). An enlarged edition of the _Life_
(3 vols., 1891) included the journals and correspondence, 1866-1882,
published in 1887 as _Final Memorials_ (Boston and New York). Also the
volume by T. W. Higginson in the "American Men of Letters" series
(1902); E. C. Stedman's criticism in _Poets of America_; and an
article in W. D. Howells' _My Literary Friends and Acquaintance_ (New
York, 1900) which contains a valuable account of Longfellow's later
life. (T. Da.)

LONG FIVES. This game, though played in a tennis-court, bears but a slight resemblance to tennis, but is nevertheless a valuable form of preparatory practice. The game is 8 or 11 points, each stroke won counting one point to the winner. The server gives 3 points in 8, or 4 points in 11 to the striker-out. There are no chases. The winning openings count as at tennis. If a ball be struck into any other gallery or opening, it may be counted, by arrangement, either as a "let" (the rest being annulled) or against the striker; a similar arrangement is made for balls that make any chase on the hazard-side, or a chase of the last gallery on the service-side.

LONGFORD, a county of Ireland in the province of Leinster, bounded N.W. by Leitrim, N.E. by Cavan, E. and S. by Westmeath and W. by Lough Ree and Roscommon. With the exception of Carlow, Louth and Dublin, it is the smallest county in Ireland, the area being 269,408 acres, or about 421 sq. m. The general level surface is broken occasionally by low hills, which cover a considerable area at its northern angle. The principal rivers are the Camlin, which rises near Granard and flows past Longford to the Shannon, and the Inny, which entering the county from Westmeath crosses its southern corner and falls into Lough Ree. Lough Ree is partly included in Longford, and the other principal lakes are Lough Gowna, Derrylough, Lough Drum and Lough Bannow.

The Silurian axis of Newry reaches the north of this county, where
Lough Gowna lies upon it. The rest of the county, but for anticlinals
which bring up Old Red Sandstone at Longford town and Ardagh, belongs
to the Carboniferous Limestone plain, in which Lough Ree forms a very
characteristic lake, with signs of extension by solution along its
shores. Marble of fine quality has been raised. In the north
indications of iron are abundant, and there are also some traces of
lead.

The climate is somewhat moist and cold, and there is a large extent of
marsh and bog. The soil in the southern districts resting on the
limestone is a deep loam well adapted for pasture, but in the north it
is often poor. The proportion of tillage to pasture is roughly as 1 to
2. Oats and potatoes, in decreasing quantities, are the principal
crops. The numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are well
maintained. The population is almost wholly rural, but the principal
industry of agriculture is supplemented by a slight manufacture of
coarse woollens and linen. The Midland Great Western line from
Mullingar to Sligo crosses the centre of the county by way of the
county town of Longford; and the Cavan branch touches the extreme
east. The Royal Canal enters the county in the south at Abbeyshrule,
and joins the Shannon near Cloondara.

The population (52,647 in 1891; 46,672 in 1901) decreases seriously,
owing to emigration. About 90% of the total are Roman Catholics. The
only towns of any importance are Longford (the county town, pop. 3747)
and Granard (1622). The county includes six baronies. Assizes are held
at Longford, and quarter sessions at Ballymahon, Granard and Longford.
The county is in the Protestant diocese of Ardagh, and the Roman
Catholic dioceses of Ardagh and Meath. It is divided into two
parliamentary divisions, north and south, each returning one member.

The early name of Longford was Annaly or Analé, and it was a principality of the O'Farrels. Along with the province of Meath, in which it was then included, it was granted by Henry II. to Hugh de Lacy, who planted an English colony. On the division of Meath into two counties in 1543, Annaly was included in Westmeath, but under a statute of 1569, for the shiring of countries not already shired, it was made shire ground under the name of Longford.

Among antiquarian remains the chief ruin is the rath called the Moat of Granard, at the end of the main street of that town. There are monastic remains at Ardagh, a former bishopric, Longford, Moydow and on several of the islands of Lough Ree. The principal old castles are those of Rathcline near Lanesborough, and Ballymahon on the Inny. The principal modern seats are those of Carrickglass on the Camlin, and Castle Forbes, the seat of the earls of Granard. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Pallas, a village near Ballymahon, in this county; and at Edgeworthstown the family of Edgeworth, of which the famous novelist Maria Edgeworth was a member, established themselves in the 16th century.

LONGFORD, the county town of Co. Longford, Ireland, on the river Camlin, and on a branch of the Midland Great Western railway, 75 m. W.N.W. of Dublin. Pop. (1901) 3747. The principal building is St Mel's Roman Catholic cathedral for the diocese of Ardagh, one of the finest Roman Catholic churches in Ireland. The town has a considerable trade in grain, butter and bacon. There are corn-mills, a spool factory and tanneries. Longford is governed by an urban district council. The ancient name of the town was Athfada, and here a monastery is said to have been founded by St Idus, a disciple of St Patrick. The town obtained a fair and market from James I. and a charter of incorporation from Charles II., as well as the right to return two members to parliament. It was disfranchised at the Union in 1800.

LONGHI, PIETRO (1702-1762), Venetian painter, was born in Venice. He was a pupil of Antonio Palestra and Giuseppe Maria Crespi at Bologna, and devoted himself to the painting of the elegance of the social life in 18th-century Venice. The republic was dying fast, but her sons, even in this period of political decline, retained their love of pageants and ceremonies and of extravagant splendour in attire. The art of Venice was vanishing like her political power; and the only painters who attempted to stem the tide of artistic decadence were the Canaletti, Guardi, Tiepolo and Longhi. But whilst the Canaletti and Guardi dwelt upon the architectural glories of Venice, and Tiepolo applied himself to decorative schemes in which he continued the tradition of Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto, Longhi became the chronicler of the life of his compatriots. In a way his art may be set beside Hogarth's, though the Venetian did not play the part of a satirical moralist. He has aptly been called the Goldoni of painting. His sphere is that of light social comedy--the life at the café, the hairdresser's, at the dancing-school, at the dressmaker's. The tragic, or even the serious, note is hardly sounded in his work, which, in its colour, is generally distinguished by a rich mellow quality of tone. Most of his paintings are in the public and private collections of Venice. They are generally on a small scale, but the staircase of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice is decorated by him with seven frescoes, representing scenes of fashionable life. At the Venice academy are a number of his genre pictures and a portrait of the architect Temanza; at the Palazzo Quirini-Stampalia the portrait of Daniele Dolfino, "The Seven Sacraments" (etched by Pitteri), a "Temptation of St Anthony," a "Circus," a "Gambling Scene," and several other genre pictures and portraits; at the Museo Correr a dozen scenes of Venetian life and a portrait of Goldoni. In England the National Gallery owns "The Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in an Arena," a "Domestic Group," "The Fortune-Teller," and the portrait of the Chevalier Andrea Tron; two genre pictures are at Hampton Court Palace, and others in the Richter and Mond collections. Many of his works have been engraved by Alessandro Longhi, Bartolozzi, Cattini, Faldoni and others. Longhi died in Venice in 1762.

LONGINUS, CASSIUS (c. A.D. 213-273), Greek rhetorician and philosophical critic, surnamed PHILOLOGUS. The origin of his gentile name Cassius is unknown; it can only be conjectured that he adopted it from a Roman patron. He was perhaps a native of Emesa (Homs) in Syria, the birthplace of his uncle Fronto the rhetorician. He studied at Alexandria under Origen the heathen, and taught for thirty years at Athens, one of his pupils being the Neoplatonist Porphyry. Longinus did not embrace the new speculations then being developed by Plotinus, but continued a Platonist of the old type. He upheld, in opposition to Plotinus, the doctrine that the Platonic ideas existed outside the divine [Greek: Nous (hoti exô tou nou hyphestêke ta noêta]: see F. Überweg, _Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_, 9th ed., 1903, i. § 72). Plotinus, after reading his treatise [Greek: Peri archôn] (_On First Principles_), remarked that Longinus might be a scholar ([Greek: philologos]), but that he was no philosopher ([Greek: philosophos]). The reputation which Longinus acquired by his learning was immense; he is described by Porphyry as "the first of critics," and by Eunapius as "a living library and a walking museum" or encyclopaedia. During a visit to the East he became teacher in Greek, and subsequently chief counsellor in state affairs, to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. It was by his advice that she endeavoured to regain her independence; Aurelian, however, crushed the attempt, and while Zenobia was led captive to Rome to grace Aurelian's triumph, Longinus paid the forfeit of his life.

Longinus was the author of a large number of works, nearly all of which have perished. Among those mentioned by Suïdas are _Quaestiones Homericae_, _An Homerus fuerit philosophus_, _Problemata Homeri et solutiones_, _Atticorum vocabulorum editiones duae_; the most important of his philological works, [Greek: philologoi homiliai] (_Philological Discourses_) consisting of at least 21 books, is omitted. A considerable fragment of the [Greek: Peri telous] (_De finibus, On the Chief End_) is preserved in the _Life of Plotinus_ by Porphyry (§ 20). Under his name there are also extant Prolegomena to the _Encheiridion_ of Hephaestion on metre (printed in R. Westphal, _Scriptores Metrici Graeci_, i. 1866) and the fragment of a treatise on rhetoric (L. Spengel, _Rhetores Graeci_, i. pp. 299-320), inserted in the middle of a similar treatise by Apsines. It gives brief practical hints on invention, arrangement, style, memory and other things useful to the student. Some important excerpts [Greek: ek tôn Logginou] (Spengel, i. 325-328) may possibly be from the [Greek: philologoi homiliai].

It is as the reputed author of the well-known and remarkable work
[Greek: Peri hypsous] (generally, but inadequately, rendered _On the
Sublime_) that Longinus is best known. Modern scholars, however, with
few exceptions, are agreed that it cannot with any certainty be
ascribed to him, and that the question of authorship cannot be
determined (see Introduction to Roberts's edition). The following are
the chief arguments against Longinus. (1) The treatise is not
mentioned by any classical author, nor in any lists of the works
attributed to him. (2) The evidence of the MSS. shows that doubts
existed even in early times. In the most important (No. 2036 in the
Paris Library, 10th century) the heading is [Greek: Dionysiou ê
Logginou], thus giving an alternative author Dionysius; in the
Laurentian MS. at Florence the title has [Greek: anônymou], implying
that the author was unknown. The ascription in the Paris MS. led to
the addition of Dionysius to the name of the reputed author--Dionysius
Cassius Longinus, accounted for by the supposition that his early name
was Dionysius, Cassius Longinus being subsequently adopted from a
Roman patron whose client he had been. (3) The absence of any
reference to the famous writers on rhetoric of the age of the
Antonines, such as Hermogenes and Alexander son of Numenius. (4) The
opening sentences show that the [Greek: Peri hypsous] was written with
a view of correcting the faults of style and method in a treatise by
Caecilius (q.v.) of Calacte on the same subject. As Caecilius
flourished during the reign of Augustus, it is hardly likely that his
work would have been selected for purposes of criticism in the 3rd
century. (5) General considerations of style and language and of the
point of view from which the work is written. In favour of Longinus:
(1) The traditional ascription, which held its ground unchallenged
till the beginning of the 18th century. (2) The philosophical
colouring of the first chapter and the numerous quotations from Plato
are in accordance with what is known of his philosophical opinions.
(3) The treatise is the kind of work to be expected from one who was
styled "the first of critics." (4) The Ammonius referred to (xiii. 3)
is supposed to be Ammonius Saccas (c. 175-242), but it appears from
the Venetian scholia to the _Iliad_ that there was an earlier Ammonius
(fl. c. 140 B.C.), a pupil and successor of Aristarchus at Alexandria,
who, judging from the context, is no doubt the writer in question. The
reference is therefore an argument against Longinus.

The work is dedicated to a certain Terentianus, of whom nothing is
known (see Roberts's edition, p. 18).

The alternative author Dionysius of the MSS. has been variously
identified with the rhetorician and historian Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, the Atticist Aelius Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Dionysius Atticus of Pergamum, Dionysius of Miletus. Other suggested
claimants to the authorship are Plutarch (L. Vaucher in _Études
critiques sur le traité du sublime_ (Geneva, 1854) and Aelius Theon of
Alexandria (W. Christ), the author of a work on the _Arrangement of
Speech_. But it seems most probable that the author was an unknown
writer who flourished in the 1st century soon after Caecilius and
before Hermogenes. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff gives his date as about A.D.
40.

The rendering _On the Sublime_ implies more than is intended by the
Greek [Greek: Peri hypsous] ("impressiveness in style," Jebb). Nothing
abnormal, such as is associated with the word "sublime," is the
subject of discussion; it is rather a treatise on style. According to
the author's own definitions, "Sublimity is a certain distinction and
excellence in expression," "sublimity consists in elevation,"
"sublimity is the echo (or expression) of a great soul" (see note in
Roberts).

The treatise is especially valuable for the numerous quotations from
classical authors, above all, for the preservation of the famous
fragment of Sappho, the ode to Anactoria, beginning

[Greek: phainetai moi kênos isos theoisin],

imitated by Catullus (li.) _Ad Lesbiam_,

"Ille mi par esse deo videtur."

"Its main object is to point out the essential elements of an
impressive style which, avoiding all tumidity, puerility, affectation
and bad taste, finds its inspiration in grandeur of thought and
intensity of feeling, and its expression in nobility of diction and in
skilfully ordered composition" (Sandys).

A full bibliography of the subject will be found in the edition by W.
R. Roberts (Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1907), containing an Introduction,
Analysis, Translation and Appendices (textual, linguistic, literary
and bibliographical), to which may be added F. Marx, _Wiener Studien_,
xx. (1898), and F. Kaibel, _Hermes_, xxxiv. (1899), who respectively
advocate and reject the claims of Longinus to the authorship; J. E.
Sandys, _History of Classical Scholarship_ (2nd ed., 1906), pp. 288,
338, should also be consulted. The number of translations in all the
languages of Europe is large, including the famous one by Boileau,
which made the work a favourite text-book of the bellelettristic
critics of the 18th century. A text and translation was published by
A. O. Prickard (1907-1908).

LONG ISLAND, an island, 118 m. long and 12 to 23 m. wide, with its axis E.N.E. and W.S.W., roughly parallel with the S. shore of Connecticut, U.S.A., from which it is separated by Long Island Sound (115 m. long and 20-25 m. wide) and lying S.E. of the mainland of New York state, of which it is a part, and immediately E. of Manhattan Island. Area, 1682 sq. m. The east end is divided into two narrow peninsulas (the northern culminating in Orient Point about 25 m. long, the southern ending in Montauk Point, the eastern extremity of the island, about 40 m. long) by the three bays, Great Peconic, Little Peconic (in which lies Shelter Island) and Gardiners (in which lies Gardiners Island). The N. shore is broken in its western half by the fjords of Flushing Bay, Little Neck Bay, Manhasset Bay, Cold Spring Harbor; Huntington Bay (nearly landlocked), Smithtown Bay and Port Jefferson Harbor, which also is nearly landlocked. East of Port Jefferson the N. shore is comparatively unbroken. The S. shore has two bays, Jamaica Bay with many low islands and nearly cut off from the ocean by the narrow spur of Rockaway Beach; and the ill-defined Great South Bay, which is separated from the Atlantic by the narrow Long Beach, Jones Beach and Oak Island Beach, and by the long peninsula (35 or 40 m.), called Fire Island or Great South Beach. Still farther E. and immediately S. of Great Peconic Bay is Shinnecock Bay, about 10 m. long and cut off from the ocean by a narrow beach.

The N. side of the island was largely built by deposits along the
front of the continental glacier, and its peculiar surface is due to
such deposits. At Astoria the dark gneiss bed rock is visible. The S.
half of the island is mostly built of a light sandy or loamy soil and
is low, except for the hills (140-195 ft.) of Montauk peninsula, which
are a part of the "back-bone" of the island elsewhere running through
the centre from E. to W. and reaching its highest point in its western
extremity, Oakley's High Hill (384 ft.) and Hempstead Harbor Hill, W.
of which are the flat and fertile Hempstead Plains. North of the
back-bone or central ridge the country is hilly with glacial drift and
many boulders along the coast and with soil stonier and more fertile
than that of the "South Side." There is good clay at Whitestone and at
Lloyd's Point on the north side. This north shore is comparatively
well wooded; the middle of the island is covered with stunted oaks and
scrubby pines; the south side is a floral mean between the other
divisions. It is cut in its middle part by a few creeks and tidal
rivers[1] flowing into the Great South Bay. Another "river," the
Peconic, about 15 m. long, runs E. into Peconic Bay. On the north side
there are few waterways save Nissequoge river, partly tidal, which
runs N. into Smithtown Bay. Near the centre of the island is Lake
Ronkonkoma, which is well below the level of the surrounding country,
and whose deep cold waters with their unexplained ebb and flow are
said to have been so feared by the Indians that they would not fish
there. There are salt marshes (probably 100 sq. m. in all) on the
shore of the Sound and of the Great South Bay.

As regards its fauna Long Island is a meeting-place for equatorial and
arctic species of birds and fish; in winter it is visited occasionally
by the auk and in summer sometimes by the turkey buzzard. James E.
DeKay in his botanical and zoological survey (1842-1849) of New York
state estimated that on Long Island there were representatives of
two-thirds of the species of land birds of the United States and
seven-eighths of the water birds--probably an exaggerated estimate for
the time and certainly not true now. There is snipe and duck shooting,
especially on the shores of the Great South Bay; there is good deer
hunting, especially in Islip town; and there are several private
preserves, some stocked with English game birds, within 50 m. of New
York City. There are many excellent trout streams and the island was
known in aboriginal times for its fresh and salt water fish. Indian
names referring to fishing places are discussed in Wm. W. Tooker's
_Some Indian Fishing Stations upon Long Island_. Long Island wampum
was singularly good--the Indian name, Seawanhacky (Seawanhaka, &c.),
of the island has been interpreted to mean "shell treasury"--and black
wampum was made from the purple part of the shell of the quahaug. Soft
clams are dug on the north shore at low tide and hard clams are found
along the southern shore, where (at Islip) they were first
successfully canned; scallops and other small shell fish are taken,
especially at the E. end of the island. But the most important shell
fishery is that of oysters. The famous Blue Points grow in the Great
South Bay, particularly at Sayville and Bellport, where seed oysters
planted from Long Island Sound develop into the Blue Points with
characteristics of no other variety of oyster. Farther west, on the S.
shore are grown the well-known Rockaway oysters. The New York State
Fish Commission has a hatchery at Cold Spring Harbor on the N. shore.
The largest commercial fisheries are on the south side, in the ocean
off Fire Island Beach, where there are great "pounds" in which
captured fish are kept alive before shipment to market. Sag Harbor and
East Hampton on the E. end of the island were important whaling ports
in the 18th century and the first part of the 19th, and they and other
fishing villages afterward did a large business in the capture of
menhaden (_Brevoortia tyrannus_), a small shad-like fish, which,
following the custom of the Indians, they manufactured into
fertilizer. At Glen Cove there are now great starch factories.

The west end of the island has been called New York's market garden.
On the Hempstead Plains and immediately E. of them along the north
shore great quantities of cabbage and cucumbers are grown and
manufactured into sauerkraut and pickles. There are large cranberry
fields near the village of Calverton, immediately W. of Riverhead.