At the Bowdoin College commencement, in 1832, Mr. Longfellow delivered the poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1833 also appeared the first two numbers of Outre-Mer; or, A Pilgrimage to the Old World by an American (Hilliard, Gray, & Co., Bos ton), and two years later the whole work was published by Harper & Brothers of New-York City; Mr. Longfellow selling it to them for five hundred dollars. It is written in a most charming vein. The light and lambent humor is like that of Irving or Lamb or Sterne. There is a buoyancy in the style like that of the blue sky, and a freshness as of clover or dew. The work is picturesque, antiquarian; golden and mellow as the shield of its Lion d'Or, full of quiet causerie about mediæval legends, trouvères, and old chansons. Quaint characters are depicted; and the beautiful scenes of classic Italy, sunburnt Spain, and vine-covered France are lovingly portrayed. There is a chapter on "Old Spanish Ballads," and in the second volume appears the translation of the stanzas of Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father Don Rodrigo.

The title of the book was probably suggested by Thibaut, who in his "Roi de Navarre " says,

"Si j'ai long tems été en Romanie,
Et outre-mer fait mon pèlerinage."

On the title-page appears this quotation from old Sir John Maundeville :

"I have passed manye landes and manye yles and contrees, and cherched manye fulle straunge places, and have ben in manye a fulle gode honourable companye. Now I am comen home to reste. And thus recordynge the tyme passed, I have fulfilled these thynges and putte

hem wryten in this boke, as it woulde come into my mynde."

To the Epistle Dedicatory is prefixed this stanza from Hurdis:

"The cheerful breeze sets fair: we fill our sail,
And scud before it. When the critic starts,
And angrily unties his bags of wind,

Then we lay to, and let the blast go by."

In the course of his remarks in the Epistle Dedicatory the author says:

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Besides, what perils await the adventurous author who launches forth into the uncertain current of public favor in so frail a bark as this! The very rocking of the tide may overset him; or peradventure some freebooting critic, prowling about the great ocean of letters, may descry his strange colors, hail him through a gray goose-quill, and perhaps sink him without more ado."

The book is conceived (in a playful and merry vein) to be a series of tales told by a pilgrim, — like those told by palmers in baronial castles of old. The first chapter begins thus:

"Lystenyth, ye godely gentylmen, and all that ben hereyn!' I am a pilgrim benighted on my way, and crave a shelter till the storm is over, and a seat by the fireside in this honorable company. As a stranger I claim this courtesy at your hands; and will repay your hospitable welcome with tales of the countries I have passed through in my pilgrimage. . . . I have traversed France from Normandy to Navarre; smoked my pipe in a Flemish inn; floated through Holland in a Trekschuit; trimmed my midnight lamp in a Ger

man university; wandered and mused amid the classic scenes of Italy; and listened to the gay guitar and merry castanet on the borders of the blue Guadalquivir."

As a specimen of the book, take this description of the old Norman diligence:

"It was one of those ponderous vehicles which totter slowly along the paved roads of France, laboring beneath a mountain of trunks and bales of all descriptions, and, like the Trojan horse, bearing a groaning multitude within it. It was a curious and cumbersome machine, resembling the bodies of three coaches placed upon one carriage, with a cabriolet on top for outside passengers. On the panels of each door were painted the fleurs-de-lis of France; and upon the side of the coach, emblazoned in gold characters, Exploitation Générale des Messageries Royales des Diligences pour le Havre, Rouen, et Paris.""

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In an article on Longfellow in The Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, George William Curtis said of Outre-Mer: "It is the romance of the Continent, and not that of England, which inspires him. It is the ruddy light upon the vines, and the scraps of old chansons, which enliven and decorate his pilgrimage; and through all his literary life they have not lost their fascination. While Irving sketches Rural Life in England,' Longfellow paints The Village of Auteuil;' Irving gives us The Boar's Head Tavern,' and Longfellow The Golden Lion Inn;' Irving draws a 'Royal Poet,' Longfellow discusses The Trouvères' or 'The Devotional Poetry of Spain.' . . . Geoffrey Crayon is a humorist, while the Pilgrim beyond the Sea is a poet. The one looks at the broad aspects of English life with

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the shrewd twinkling eye of the man of the world: the other haunts the valley of the Loire, the German street, the Spanish inn, with the kindling fancy of the scholar and poet." During the twenty years following the publication of Outre-Mer, seventy-five hundred copies were sold.

Under the title, The Schoolmaster, Mr. Longfellow began, in Buckingham's New-England Magazine, the sketches and studies which he afterwards published with the title Outre-Mer.

To the Longfellow number of The Literary World (Feb. 26, 1881) Mr. Horace E. Scudder contributed a pleasant paper in which he compared the two productions. Mr. Scudder's paper shall here be given entire, and will speak for itself:

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"There were kings before Agamemnon; and the reader of The Atlantic' to-day will find that his fathers had also their literary magazines- of somewhat precarious existence, to be sure, but containing often papers and poems which have passed into the accepted literature of the country. The New-England Magazine, published and conducted by J. T. Buckingham and his son until the son's death, and after that by the father alone, was for a time a fair representative of the culture of Boston. The contributions were rarely signed, and the publisher could offer only very diminutive golden bait; but, besides the work of aspirants who never came to fame, one may find here articles, sketches, and poems, by Everett, Story, Hillard, Hildreth, Withington, Dr. Howe, Dr. Peabody, Epes Sargent, Filmes, and Longfellow. It was in this magazine, the reader will remember, that Dr. Holmes published a trial chapter of The Autocrat;' but so

completely had the title disappeared that nobody remembered it when he resumed it twenty-five years afterward, in the more mature wit and wisdom which made the early numbers of The Atlantic famous Many of his bright young poems appeared here; and a curious experiment, headed Report of the Editorial Department,' and signed O. W. H., will be found in the number for January, 1833.

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"Mr. Longfellow's contributions, so far as we know, are confined to a series of sketches, appearing at irregular intervals, which interest us from their relation to his subsequent acknowledged work. In the first number of the magazine, that for July, 1831, will be found among the original papers one entitled The Schoolmaster,' Chapter I., and having all the air of being the first of a series. A motto from Franklin stands at the head

:

"My character, indeed, I would favor you with, but that I am cautious of praising myself, lest I should be told my trumpeter's dead; and I cannot find in my heart at present to say any thing to my own disadvantage.'

"The Schoolmaster opens with a half-confidential disclosure to the reader. It is written in the first person:

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"I am a schoolmaster [it begins] in the little village of Sharon. A son of New England, I have been educated in all her feelings and prejudices. To her maternal care I owe the little that is good within me; and upon her bosom I hope to repose hereafter when my worldly task is done, and my soul, like a rejoicing. schoolboy, shall close its weary book, and burst forth from this earthly schoolhouse. My childhood was