But the exigencies of social life, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States, have absurdly forbidden us, except on rare holidays, this harmless indulgence of pure Nature - worship. Mr. Longfellow has therefore devoted nine tenths of his poetical labours to the task of interpreting human character and the moral destiny of our race. With the utmost sincerity and fidelity, like Tennyson and Browning, he has endeavoured to discern the ethical facts, and spiritual relations of our mortal existence, and to tell the truth about them to the best of his knowledge. The way

in which he has gone about this work has been similar to Browning's-that is, through the study and artistic representation of a wide range of historical or literary traditions, mostly belonging either to foreign nationalities or to remote past ages. Longfellow has also concurred with Browning in his preference, for this purpose, of the lore of Medieval Europe to that of classic antiquity. He is professor of modern languages at Harvard University. In his discursive prose essays and romances, 'Hyperion' and 'Outremer, we may observe his ubiquitous scholarship of the different European languages and their legends. The Rhineland and the old cities of Germany; the old provinces of France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy; Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, including Iceland, are made the alternate homes of his travelling Muse. She, nevertheless, comes faithfully back to Massachusetts, and there sits down to relate some characteristic tale of the Pilgrim Fathers, the Puritans of the old colonial time, or the sturdy patriots of the American Revolution. The educated New Englander is thus a cosmopolitan, or complete humanist, in his range of intellectual sympathies.

Mr. Longfellow is, indeed, as one might say, an omnivorous translator of foreign poetry and adapter of foreign themes. These versatile performances do not much concern our estimate of his merits as an original poet. His versions from the French, German, and Italian are usually both more accurate and more graceful than any versions of the same texts by another hand. We must, nevertheless, take one very important exception. His complete translation of the Divina Commedia, which was published a few years since, while rendering, with the strictest and minutest care, every particle of Dante's meaning, is not agreeable as an English composition. It is defaced by a strange mixture of bastard words; many of them long obsolete, some never in use at all, but coined for this occasion; and some here employed by the translator in a sense which they never had before. Yet we know that, in all his previous writings of prose or verse, Mr. Longfellow's style was distinguished by an exquisite purity and propriety of diction. His arbitrary procedure in this work can only be explained by supposing that he has intended to try the experiment of a new method of translating. has apparently tried to reproduce in every line as many as possible of the identical syllabic sounds which he found in the corresponding line of the original text. With this curious object, he has not hesitated to use the oddest words and the most awkward inversions of grammatical structure, We do not like the effect of such a literary freak.

He

Turning with great pleasure to a brief examination of the list of his chief original works of poetry, we may divide them into two main groups. Those dealing with foreign legends of an allegorical or ideal character English Essays III.

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have the air of being more the studies of a learned scholar of literary subjects remodelled with exquisite skill than the fruits of native inspiration. Those which consist of direct narratives from the history of America or idyllic representations of American social life are more substantially original, and to us of greater value. Another classification might group his longest poems into those of a dramatic form and those which simply relate a story or describe a situation. We should then be obliged to own that Longfellow fails in his attempts as a dramatist not less remarkably than he succeeds as a lyrical and idyllic poet. He shows a want of the power of creating such entire individual personalities, each with an independent capability of existence and with a spring of action in himself, as the drama essentially requires. He can do no more than indicate the motions of his plot and supply an appropriate set of eloquent speeches, to which the names of his wouldbe dramatis personæ are prefixed. Neither in his romantic play of "The Spanish Student, which turns upon a perilous love affair with a gipsy dancing-girl, nor in his New England Tragedies,' which concern the fanatical persecutions of Quakers and supposed witches by the Massachusetts Puritans of the seventeenth century, has he been able to fulfil the main condition of dramatic interest.

"The Golden Legend, notwithstanding this defect. is one of the most admirable productions of his genius; because it is, though framed as a play, with acts, scenes, and dialogues, rather a combination of lyrics put together in the setting of a wildly-pathetic mediæval story. In this respect it may be compared with Goethe's 'Faust; and we venture to think it not unworthy of

the comparison in its own degree. The main conception is borrowed from an old German romance of the twelfth century. It is the tale of Prince Henry of Hoheneck, who was dying of an incurable disease-incurable by any other remedy than a lotion to be brewed of the blood of a pure young maiden, who should have voluntarily sacrificed her life to preserve his. This is a fantastic and unnatural story; but the bursts of lyrical sentiment and the poetic descriptions of nature which abound in The Golden Legend are exceedingly beautiful; while there is a fine humorous insight into the odd corners of human character, in the exhibition of the street-preaching friar, the monastery with its saints and revellers, and the brawling pedants at the University of Salerno, which reminds us of Browning. As a diorama of the opinions and manners fostered by popular belief in the Catholic mythology of the Middle Ages, this poem has also some literary importance, but it will never attract the multitude of uninstructed readers. Mr. Longfellow whose religious sympathies are Catholic in a different sense, that of a 'Free Christian Union,' shows in this and other writings his disposition to contemplate with strong interest the faith and practices of the Romish Church as part of the moral history of humanity.

In that unique mythological epic of the North American Indian heroic age, the romantic poem of 'Hiawatha, with its masterly appropriation of a large store of ethnological learning, he has produced a charming poem and an instructive monument of human life. The first reading is seldom quite satisfactory. One is teased by the multitude of queer, outlandish names; the frequent repetitions of phrases and epithets, as in

Homer; and the peculiar versification, an unrhymed. octosyllabic chant, which resembles, in its lilting strain, the rude metrical compositions of the old Anglo-Saxon form of our language. But we soon become aware, upon a second reading, that the rhythmic cadences of Hiawatha, when run lightly and trippingly off the tongue, are perfectly musical; the strange words are explained by their immediate context; while the air of more than rustic, more than boyish, simplicity, given by the artless mention of so many unessential details, is found at last not more wearisome than in the Iliad and 'Odyssey' of the immortal Greek. The poet who speaks to us here is not the highly educated professor of Harvard University, but the unlettered Indian singer Nawadaha, dwelling in the Vale of Tawasentha, and warbling his native wood-notes wild,' as freely as those he heard from the birds of the forest primeval, or in the moorlands and the fenlands, and on the shores of the Great Lakes,

Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odours of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their wild reverberations,

As of thunder in the mountains?'

In order to enjoy this noble poem, we must exert the active faculty of imagination. We must try to feel, in ourselves, what the poor savage Ojibways and Dacotahs must have felt, supposing them to have really been favoured, by divine appointment, with an inspired chief of their race; a demigod, a son of the west wind, sent to be their leader and teacher; one accred