The Evening dispatch. [volume] (Provo, City, Utah) 1891-1895, 1895-11-23
LoNetELLowos FIRST POETRY.
He Was More Than Thirty When His Firus
Volume Was Published.

Toward the end of 1886 he took F
his abode in Cambridge, where he waf
90 reside for the rest of his life-for 40
years. He was made to feel at home ID
the society of the scholars who cluster
ed about Harvard, then almost the sole
center of culture in the country. His
work for the college was not SO exacs
Ing that be had not time for literature
The impulse TO write poetry returned.
yet tne neys book he published was the
prose Hyperion, " which appeared iP
1889, and which, though it has little
plot or action, may be called romance
The youthful and poetic hero, apassioD'
ate pilgrim in Europe, was, more OF
less, a reflection of Longfellow himself.
A few months later in the same yeal
he published his first volume of poetry
-''Voices Of the Night''-in which hs
reprin ted certain of his earlier verses.
most of them written while he was al
Bowdoin. Some of these boyish verses
show the influence of Bryant, and 9th.
ers reveal to US that the young poet had
not yet looked at life for himself, but
still saw it through the stained glass
windows of European tradition. The
came volume contained also some more
recent poems-"The Releaguered City"
sDd ''The Reaper and the Flowers and
she psalm of Life perhaps the first
of his poems to win swift and abiding
popularity. These lyrics testified that
Longfellow was beginning to have
style of his own As Hawthorne wrot.
so him, Nothing equal to them was
ever written in this world-this west
srn world, l mean. -
Certainly no American author hac
yet written any poem of the kind Sc
good as the best of those in Longfel-
lows volume of Ballads" printed
two years later. Better than any othe
American poet LoDgfellow had master
ed the difficulties Of the story in song,
and he knew how to combine the swits.
aess ard the picturesqueness the ballad
requires. His ballads have more Of the
old time magic, more of the early sim
piicity, tLan those of any other modern
English author. Of its kind there is
Aothing better in the language than
''The Skeleton In Armur," with it.
splendid lyric swing, and 1.-THE Village
Blacksmith and ''The Wreck of the
Gesperus" are almost as good in THEN
humber sphere. Excelsior, in the
same volume, voices the noble aspira
tions of youth ard has been taken te
heart by thousands of boys and girls.--
Professor Brander Matthews in S.
Nicholas
The fact is generally known that 40
cording to the experiments of the late
Professor Heinrich Hertz at Bonn, the
velocity with which electricity is prop
agated is nearly identical with the ve-
locity of light The identity may be per.
feet, but experiments have as yet failed
to prove it So
In a recent communication to the
French Academy Of Sciences, NJ. Mas
cart has shown that the mean velocity
of electricity, as deduoed from expert.
ments, is 1873, 185 miles per second
This is about 1 per cent greater than
the velocity of light, which is 186, 800
miles per second.
1t is believed that if light and cleo
tricity do move with exactly the same
speed the velocity ascribed to light more
closely represents that speed than the
velocity ascribed to electricity, because
the experiments are most satisfactory
and probably more accurate in the case
of light --Yonth's S Companion