LONGFELLOW, HENRY W. 



LOOM, POSITIVE-MOTION. 479 



Longfellow died when he had reached the 

 ripe old age of seventy-five, March 24, 1882. 

 His funeral, attended by numbers of the ^most 

 distinguished of his countrymen, was simple 

 and without any display, and his mortal re- 

 mains were placed in the family vault at Mount 

 Auburn. Public services were held in the 

 chapel of Harvard College, when words of 

 mingled grief, resignation, and eulogy were 

 uttered by those who knew and appreciated 

 his worth. It may be mentioned here that 

 steps have been taken in England to erect a 

 suitable memorial of Longfellow in Westmin- 

 ster Abbey Tennyson, as every way fitting, 

 taking an active part in the proposed honoring 

 of our American poet. 



It is perhaps too soon as yet to attempt to 

 fix his precise place and rank among American 

 poets. If he be not the very first, he is cer- 

 tainly in the front rank of modern masters of 

 song. He possessed the true poetic genius and 

 insight; and though he is not the singer of 

 violent, fierce passion, or of tbe profounder 

 depths of tragedy that is, not a Homer, or a 

 Dante, or a Milton, or a Shakespeare he is 

 still a master in all those emotions and passions 

 which stir the hearts of mankind in general. 

 He is one whom myriads of readers learn to 

 love as well as admire, and who continue stead- 

 fast in their love all their life long. He is, in 

 the best sense of the words, the people's poet, 

 and Longfellow himself coveted no higher fame 

 than this. There is one feature in his poems 

 to be noted, and that is his perfect skill as an 

 artist. He always made most careful prepara- 

 tion before beginning to write any of his longer 

 poems, and he spared no toil to secure the 

 most complete accuracy, in every, even the 

 minutest, particular. His large and varied 

 reading, his thorough culture, his keen appre- 

 ciation of the beauty and power of art, his own 

 genial, loving, kindly nature, his true gentle- 

 manly instincts and perceptions, all these not 

 only aided the poet but guided him to a large 

 extent in his work. From first to last, Long- 

 fellow was the same ; and it is worthy of note 

 that his mental and poetical vigor was vouch- 

 safed to him to the very close of life, as may 

 easily be seen by a perusal of " Morituri Salu- 

 tamus " and " Ultima Thule." 



The works of Henry W. Longfellow may 

 properly here be enumerated. They are pub- 

 lished both separately and in collected forms 

 by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston, 

 in various sizes and at various prices, from the 

 diamond 18mo (poems) to the illustrated 8vo. 

 The best library edition is the one known as 

 the Cambridge edition, the poetical works be- 

 ing in four crown 8vo volumes, the prose 

 works in two volumes. Most of his "Earlier 

 Poems," written before he was nineteen, are 

 included in his collected works ; the others in 

 the order of time are as follow : 



1. Voices of the Night, 1839. 



2. Ballads and other Poems, 1841. 



3. Poems on Slavery, 1842. 



4. The Spanish Student, 1843. 



5. The Belfry of Bruges and other Poems, 1845. 



6. Evangeline. A Tale of Acadie, 1847. 



7. The Seaside and the Fireside, 1847. 



8. The Song of Hiawatha, 1855. 



9. The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858. 



10. Birds of Passage, Flights First to Fii'th. 



11. Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863. 



12. Flower-de-Luce, and other Poems, 1866. 



13. CHRISTUS: A Mystery. In Three Parts. I. 



The Divine Tragedy. II. The Golden Le- 

 gend. III. The New England Tragedies, 

 1872, '51, '68. 



14. Aftermath, 1874. 



15. The Hanging of the Crane, 1874. 



16. Morituri Salutamus, 1875. 



17. The Masque of Pandora, 1876. 



18. Keramos, and other Poems, 1878. 



19. Ultima Thule, 1880. 



20. In the Harbor, Part II of Ultima Thule, 1881. 



21. Translations, at various periods, 1833-1880. 



22. The Waif. A Collection of Poems. Edited by 



H. W. Longfellow, 1846. 



23. TheEstray. A Collection of Poems. Edited by 



the same, 1846. 



24. The Divina Commedia of Dante. Translated 



from the Italian, 3 vols., 1867-'70. 



25. Poems of Places, 31 vols., 18mo. Edited by the 



same, 1872. 



PROSE WORKS. 1. Outre-Mer. A Pilgrimage beyond 

 the Sea, 1835. 



2. Hyperion. A Eomance, 1839. 



3. Driftwood. From the French, 1833. 



4. Kavanagh. A Tale, 1849. 



LOOM, POSITIVE-MOTION. A simple 

 contrivance has been introduced by James Ly- 

 all, an American inventor, by which a positive 

 and even motion is given to the shuttle in 

 weaving. Many attempts have been made to 

 remedy the defects of the flying shuttle, and 

 bring the shuttle-movement to the same de- 

 gree of mechanical efficiency as the other parts 

 of the modern loom. Compressed air, mag- 

 nets, clutch-sticks to pull the shuttle through, 

 and revolving rollers to catch it and expel it 

 from a shuttle-box, have been tried, to give it 

 a positive and controllable motion. The solu- 

 tion of this problem may take rank with the 

 flying shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1835, 

 which it would supplant, with Dr. Arkwright's 

 power-loom, and with Jacquard's process for 

 weaving designs, as a great improvement in 

 the weaving art. The inconveniences of the 

 intermittent action of the shuttle, driven, as 

 heretofore, by picking-sticks, are such as to 

 make the loom, with its perfect mechanism in 

 other respects, an uncertain instrument, and 

 cause frequent stoppages of work and destruc- 

 tion of materials. The friction of the shuttle 

 on the warp weakens the threads constantly, 

 and makes the fabric less durable than it would 

 otherwise be. Some of the threads break un- 

 der the strain. The frequent eccentric behav- 

 ior of the shuttle is more serious, and causes 

 all degrees of damage, from occasional broken 

 threads and defective selvage, to the destruc- 

 tion of the piece of cloth or breaking of the 

 machine. The leather on the picking-staff 

 becomes irregularly worn, and the shuttle 

 takes a wrong direction, or the blows are too 

 weak, causing it to stop short in its course, 

 or too strong, causing it to recoil from the 



