Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘ [4] any one except their own poets!’ She then repeated the verses beginning, ‘I stood on the bridge at midnight,’ and added, ‘I long to visit Boston, that I may stand on the bridge.’ Then an English captain, returning from the Zulu war, said, ‘I can give you something better than that,’ and recited in a voice like a trumpet,—

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream.

Presently a gray-haired Scotchman began to recite the poem,—

There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!

An American contributed ‘My Lost Youth,’ being followed by a young Greek temporarily living in England, who sang ‘Stars of the Summer Night.’ Finally the captain of the steamer, an officer of the French navy detailed for that purpose, whom nobody had suspected of knowing a word of English, recited, in an accent hardly recognizable, the first verse of ‘Excelsior,’ and when the Russian lady, unable to understand him, denied the fact of its being English at all, he replied, ‘Ah, oui, madame, ça vient de votre Longfellow’ (Yes, madam, that is from your Longfellow). Six nationalities had thus been represented, and the Russian lady said, as they rose from the table, ‘Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, ’