Moral regeneration seems
to him an individual, not a social, affair.
His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary
artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never
appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on
either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language
have secured the effect produced by _The Scarlet Letter_. He wished to be
impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in _The House of the Seven
Gables_, but he says simply:--
"She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's
mother tongue."
Sincerity is the marked characteristic of this simplicity in style, and it
makes an impression denied to the mere striver after effect, however
cunning his art.
A writer of imperishable romances, a sympathetic revealer of the soul, a
great moralist, a master of style, Hawthorne is to be classed with the
greatest masters of English fiction. His artist's hand
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free."
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 1807-1882
[Illustration: HENRY W. LONGFELLOW]
LIFE--Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in
Portland, Maine, in 1807.
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