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,
And catch, in sudden gleams,
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams. 
And the burden of that old song,
It murmurs and whispers still: 
’A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’

“I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea. 
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still: 
’A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’”

Longfellow’s earliest volume, “The Voices of the Night,” was one of the few books of American poetry that some of us who are now growing old ourselves can remember reading, just as we were emerging from childhood.  “The Reaper and the Flowers” and the “Psalm of Life,”—­I recall the delight with which I used to repeat those poems.  The latter, so full of suggestions which a very young person could feel, but only half understand, was for that very reason the more fascinating.  It seemed to give glimpses, through opening doors, of that wonderful new world of mankind, where children are always longing to wander freely as men and women.  Looking forward and aspiring are among the first occupations of an imaginative child; and the school-boy who declaimed the words: 

  “Lives of great men all remind us
      We can make our lives sublime,”

and the school-girl who read them quietly by herself, felt them, perhaps, no less keenly than the man of thought and experience.

Longfellow has said that—­

                    “Sublimity always is simple
  Both in sermon and song, a child can seize on its meaning,”

and the simplicity of his poetry is the reason why children and young people have always loved it; the reason, also, why it has been enjoyed by men and women and children all over the world.