 Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect.Toward the end of his life, contemporaries considered him as more of a children's poet, as many of his readers were children.A reviewer in 1848 accused Longfellow of creating a "goody two-shoes kind of literature ... slipshod, sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing".