SOURCE: “Longfellow: The Poet of the Household,” in Great Spiritual Writers of America, Paul Elder and Co., 1916, pp. 58-67.

In the following essay, Fitch examines Longfellow's enduring popularity as a poet.

Longfellow cannot be classed among the world's greatest poets—with Shakespeare, Browning, Tennyson, or Victor Hugo—but he is probably more widely read than any of these poets of the first rank. Thomas Wentworth Higginson quotes from Professor Grovesnor of Amherst College an anecdote which shows the worldwide popularity of the author of Evangeline and Hiawatha. The professor was one of a party traveling from Constantinople to Marseilles when the talk at table turned upon poetry, and no less than six persons of six different nationalities repeated poems of Longfellow and declared that he was their favorite poet. The Russian lady who started the discussion, aptly ended it with this wise remark: “Do you suppose there is...