other bells than these, and they tell him that the coral was growing thousands of years in the Indian seas, and that the bells once reposed as shapeless ore in darksome mines, beneath the base of Chimborazo or the overhanging pines of Potosi.

"And thus for thee, O little child,
Through many a danger and escape,
The tall ships passed the stormy cape;
For thee in foreign lands remote,
Beneath a burning, tropic clime,

The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat,
Himself as swift and wild,

In falling, clutched the frail arbute,
The fibers of whose shallow root,
Uplifted from the soil, betrayed
The silver veins beneath it laid

The buried treasures of the miser Time."

He turns from the child to the memory of one who formerly dwelt within the walls of his historic mansion :

"Up and down these echoing stairs
Heavy with the weight of cares,

Sounded his majestic tread :
Yes, within this very room
Sat he in those hours of gloom,

Weary both in heart and head."

These grave thoughts are succeeded by pictures of the child at play, now in the orchard and now in the garden-walks, where his little carriage-wheels efface whole villages of sand-roofed tents that rise above the secret homes of nomadic tribes of ants. But, tired already, he comes back to parley with repose, and, seated with his father on a rustic seat in an old apple-tree, they see the waters of the river, and a sailless vessel dropping down the stream:

"And like it, to a sea as wide and deep,

Thou driftest gently down the tides of sleep." The poet speculates gravely on the future of his child, and bids him remember that if his fate is an untoward one, even in the perilous hour,

"When most afflicted and oppressed

From labor there shall come forth rest."

In this poem, and in "The Occultation of Orion," Mr. Longfellow has reached a table-land of imagination not hitherto attained by his Muse. "The Bridge" is a revealment of his personality, and a phase of his genius which has never ceased to charm the majority of his readers. The train of thought which it suggests is not new, but what thought that embraces mankind is new? Enough that it is natural, and sympathetic, and tender. The lines to

"The Driving Cloud" are an admirable specimen of hexameters, and a valuable addition to our scanty store of aboriginal poetry—the forerunner of an immortal contribution not yet transmuted into verse.

Under the head of "Songs" we have eight poems, two of which are modeled after a fashion that Mr. Longfellow had succeeded in making his own. I refer to "Sea-weed" and "The Arrow and the Song," two charming fantasies in which the doctrine of poetic correspondence (if I may be allowed the phrase) works out a triumphant excuse for its being. "The Day is Done " belongs to a class of poems which depend for their success upon the human element they contain, or suggest, and to which they appeal. "The Old Clock on the Stairs " is an illustration of what I mean and as good a one as can be found in the writings of any modern poet. The humanities (to adapt a phrase) were never long absent from Mr. Longfellow's thoughts. We feel their presence in "The Old Clock on the Stairs," in "The Bridge," and in the unrhymed stanzas “To an Old Danish Song-book: "

"Once in Elsinore,

At the court of old King Hamlet,
Yorick and his boon companions
Sang these ditties.

Once Prince Frederick's guard
Sang them in their smoky barracks ;-
Suddenly the English cannon
Joined the chorus!"

This volume introduced Mr. Longfellow in
a species of composition in which we have
not hitherto seen him-the sonnet, of which
there are three specimens here, neither of
the strictest Italian form; the best, perhaps,
being the one on "Dante," of whom, by
the way, we had three translations, all from
the "
Purgatorio," in the "Voices of the
Night." One feature of his poetry, and not
its strongest (me judice), was the first which
his imitators seized upon and sought to
transfer to their own rhymes. I allude to
his habit of comparing one thing with
another thing-an outward fact with an in-
ward experience, or vice versa. An exam-
ple or two will illustrate what I mean:

"Before him, like a blood-red flag The bright flamingoes flew."

"And it passed, like a glorious roll of drums, Through the triumph of his dream." "Through the closed blinds the golden sun Poured in a dusky beam. Like the celestial ladder seen

By Jacob in his dream."

"And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away."

It was the fancy of Mr. Longfellow, and not his imagination, which commended his poetry to our poetasters of both sexes, and what was excellent in him—and is excellent in itself, when restrained within due bounds --became absurd in them, it was carried to such excesses.

Mr. Longfellow's next volume was, in a certain sense, the gift of Hawthorne, to whom he was indebted for its theme. It is stated briefly in the first volume of his "American Note-books," in a cluster of memoranda written between October 24th, 1838, and January 4th, 1839. Voilà: "H. L. C heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage day, all the men of the province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him, wandered about New England all her life-time, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise." This forcible deportation of a whole people occurred in 1755, when the French, to the extent of eighteen thousand souls, were seized by the English, in the manner stated. History, which excuses so much, has perhaps excused the act; but humanity never can. It is as indefensible as the Inquisition.

"Evangeline," which was published in 1847, disputed the palm with "The Princess," which was published in the same year. The two volumes are so unlike that no comparison can, or should, be made between them.

Each shows its writer at his best, as a story-teller, and if the medieval medley surpasses the modern pastoral in richness of coloring, it is surpassed, in turn, by the tender human interest of the latter. I should no more think of telling the story of Evangeline than I should think of telling the story of Ruth. It is what the critics had been so long clamoring for,-an American poem, and it is narrated with commendable simplicity. Poetry, as poetry, is kept in the background; the descriptions, even when they appear exuberant, are subordinated to the main purpose of the poem, out of which they rise naturally; the characters are clearly drawn, and the landscapes through which

they move are thoroughly characteristic of the New World. It is the French village of Grand-Pré which we behold; it is the colonial Louisiana and the remote Westnot the fairy-land which Campbell imagined for himself when he wrote "Gertrude of Wyoming," with its shepherd swains tending their flocks on green declivities and skimming the lake with light canoes, while lovely maidens danced in brown forests to the music of timbrels! Evangeline, loving, patient, sorrowful wanderer, has taken a permanent place, I think, among the heroines of English song; but, whether the picturesque hexameters in which her pathetic story is told will hereafter rank among the standard measures of the language, can only be conjectured. That the poets have fancied them is certain, for the year after the publication of "Evangeline" saw Clough writing them in "The Bothie of Tober-naVuolich," and ten years later saw Kingsley writing them in his "Andromeda." Matthew Arnold maintains that the hexameter is the only proper measure in which to translate Homer; and already two versions of the Iliad in this measure have been made, one by Herschel (1866) and another by Cochrane (1867).

Two years before the publication of "Evangeline" (1845), Mr. Longfellow conferred a scholarly obligation upon the admirers of foreign poetry by editing "The Poets of Europe," a closely printed octavo of nearly eight hundred pages, containing specimens of European poets in ten different languages, representing the labors of upward of one hundred translators, including himself. Four years later (1849), he published a tale, entitled "Kavanagh." It has no plot to speak of, but its sketches of character are bright and amusing, and its glimpses of New England village life are pleasantly authentic. One of the personages of the book is more than a being of the mind. I refer to Mr. Hathaway, whom all our authors have met, and whose nonsense about a national literature they have listened to with as much patience as they were blessed with. waits upon Mr. Churchill (the readers of "Kavanagh" will remember), and that gentle genius ventures to differ with him in language which, I am sure, expresses the opinion of his scholarly creator. "Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent; but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal. Their roots are in their native soil; but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air that

He

ward the four corners of the heavens, and not always in the same direction." The curious thing about this national literature is (Mr. Churchill might have added), that few nations really know when they possess it, their knowledge depending upon the prior discovery of alien nations. If the English had not so settled it, would we ever have found out for ourselves what great national poets we have in Mr. Walt Whitman and Mr. Joaquin Miller? Do our critical cousins know what an inspired singer they have in Poet Close ?

What impresses me in reading Mr. Longfellow's poetry is the extent of his poetic sympathies, and the apparent ease with which he passes from one class of subjects to another. His instincts are sure in his choice of all his subjects, and his perception of their poetic capacities is keen. They translate themselves readily into his mind, and he clothes them in their singing-robes when the spirit moves him. The five years which included the publication of the next three volumes of his poetical writtings, "The Seaside and the Fireside" (1850), "The Golden Legend" (1851), and "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855),-added largely to his reputation as a man of varied attainments, to whom poetry was an art

they all disclose the skillful hand by which they were wrought. The most important of them, as a work of art, is the best poem, of which Schiller's "Song of the Bell" was the model-"The Building of the Ship." I may be singular in my opinion, but my opinion is that it is a better poem than Schiller's, in which I have never been able to interest myself, possibly because all the English translations of it are so indifferent. Its theme is better adapted to poetic treatment than Schiller's, partly, no doubt, because it is more tangible to the imagination, and capable, therefore, of more definite presentation before the eye of the mind; but largely, I think, because its associations are not attached to so many memories as cluster about the ringing of a bell. Its unity is in its self-concentration.

"The Golden Legend" transports us back to the Middle Ages, of which we have had transitory gleams in the earlier writings of Mr. Longfellow. The poetic atmosphere of that remote period envelops a lovely story, which turns, like that of " Evangeline," upon the love and devotion of woman, that in this instance is happily rewarded.

The figure of Elsie, the peasant girl, who determines to sacrifice her life to restore her prince to happiness, is worthy of an exalted

place in any poet's dream of fair women. The charm of the poem, apart from its poetry, is the thorough and easy scholarship of the writer, who contrives to conceal the evidences of his reading,-an art which few poets have possessed in an equal degree, and which Moore did not possess at all. If the opinion of an unlettered man is worth anything, the miracle-play of "The Nativity," is conceived in the very spirit of those archaic entertainments which cleric pens devised for the edification of the laity. It had no prototype, so far as I know, in modern English poetry, and has had no successor at all worthy of it, except Mr. Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." Mr. Ruskin reflected, I think, the judgment of most scholarly readers of this poem, when he wrote in his "Modern Painters that its author had entered more closely into the temper of the monk, for good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though they may have given their life's labor to the analysis.

Poets are distinguished from writers of verse not only by superiority of genius, but superiority of knowledge. The versifier gropes about in search of poetical subjects, while the poet goes to them instinctively, and often finds them when others have sought for them in vain. That there was a poetic element in the North American Indian several American poets had believed, and, so believing, had striven to quicken their verse with its creative energies. Sands and Eastburn wrote together the ponderous poem of "Yamoyden." Hoffman wrote a "Vigil of Faith;" Seba Smith a" Powhattan "; Street a "Frontenac," and others, I dare say, other aboriginal poems, whose names I have forgotten. They were unanimous in one thing, they all failed to interest their read

ers.

The cause of this was not far to seek, we can see, since success has been achieved, but it demanded a vision which was not theirs, and which, it seemed, only one American poet had. He saw that the Indian himself, as he figures in our history, was not capable of being made a poetic hero, but he saw that there might be a poetic side to him, and that it existed in his legends, if he had any. That he had many, and that they were remarkable for a certain primitive imagination, was well known. They were brought to light by the late Henry R. Schoolcraft, who heard of their existence among the Odjibwa Nation, inhabiting the region about Lake Superior in 1822. Specimens of these aboriginal fictions were

VOL. XVII.-2.

published by Mr. Schoolcraft in his "Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley" (1825), and his "Narrative of the Expedition to Itaska Lake" (1834), but they were not given to the world in their entirety until 1839 in his " Algic Researches." They were as good as manuscript for the next sixteen years, though one American poet had mastered them thoroughly. This was Mr. Longfellow, who, in 1855, turned this Indian Edda, as he happily called it, into "The Song of Hiawatha." The great and immediate success of this poem, and the increase of reputation which it brought its author, recalled the early years of the present century when Scott and Byron were sure of thousands of readers whenever it pleased them to write a metrical romance. It was eagerly read by all classes, who suddenly found themselves interested in the era of flint arrow-heads, earthen pots, and skin clothes, and in its elemental inhabitants, who, dead centuries ago, if they ever existed, were now living the everlasting life of poetry. Everybody read "The Song of Hiawatha," which passed through many editions, here and in England, and elsewhere in the Old World in other languages. Its intellectual value was universally admitted, but its form was questioned, as all new forms are sure to be. For the form was new to most readers, though not to scholars in the literatures of Northern Europe. It is original with Mr. Longfellow, his friends declared. No, his enemies answered, he has borrowed it from the Finnish epic, "The Kalewala." The quarrel, which was acrimonious, interested the critics, who are often entertained by trifles, but nobody else cared a button about it. The temporary novelty of its form led to innumerable parodies, but to nothing serious, that I remember; which I take to be a silent verdict against its permanency in English versification.

Mr. Longfellow added, three years later, to the laurels he had won by " Evangeline," by a second narrative poem in hexameters, "The Courtship of Miles Standish." It lacks the pathetic interest which is the charm of the earlier poem, but it possesses the same merit of picturesqueness, and a firmer power of delineating character. Priscilla is a very vital little Puritan maiden, who sees no impropriety in asking the man she loves why he does not speak for himself, and not for Miles Standish, who might find time to attend to his own wooing. The Puritan atmosphere here is as perfect of its kind as