Time raises Longfellow, like Lazarus, from the dead

It is good news that Longfellow is at last enjoying a revival, happily coinciding this year with the 200th anniversary of his birth. He is far and away America’s greatest poet. In his own time this was the general verdict on both sides of the Atlantic, and critical approval joined with popular success. His narrative poem ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ (1858) sold 15,000 copies on its first day of publication, in Boston and London. His home, Craigie House, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a place of pilgrimage. When he came to England in 1868, he breakfasted with Mr Gladstone, the incoming prime minister, lunched with Earl Russell, the outgoing one, spent two days with Tennyson at his house on the Isle of Wight and two days at Gadshill with Dickens, who hired two postilions in historic red jackets in his honour. He was invited to Lambeth Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to Windsor by the lady whom Dickens called ‘Old Cross Patch’, given honorary degrees by Oxford and Cambridge, and made an honorary member of the Athenaeum.