but that form was never so written before. The poetry of the piece takes that old measure and moulds it anew into an eloquent motion peculiar to itself, harmonizing with and heightening its general effect. The verse of the poem is as original as any element of it; but how clearly did it grow to be what it is, under the guidance of the poet of course, yet still as of necessity. But in Evangeline there is no such concinnity. The verse stands out like an awkward declaimer, or a bashful schoolboy rehearsing young Norval, or Hohen Linden. It has no connection with the poetry; the two are in the condition of a couple divorced a mensa et thoro, but not a vinculo matrimonii; they are mingled but not combined; in mixtion, not in solution. We are not called upon to be first affected with the tale as we proceed, and left to admire at its elegance, but are asked to admire first, and to be affected secondarily. The difference is just this, that the author is affected and not we. He is determined to be fine, and consequently determinately so. "O wad some power the giftie gie us!"—and most especially in writing poetry, for there it is impossible to hide the secret purpose. When the spirit of the Muse is upon us, and we must prophecy; when the whole soul is compelled by an angel with a fiery sword; when, as Milton saith, the poet is " soaring in the high region of his fancy, with his garland and singing robes about him ;" then these over-niceties do not appear, or if they do, they are at once pardoned and passed by. When the hot simoom of the IMAGINATION Sweeps across the burning wastes of the soul, the birds and beasts which people it fly before the blast, and the silly young estriches of our vanity run till they fall and die; but when the strong north wind of the WILL Sweeps along with only a great cloud of dust, the silly creatures stick their heads in the sand and abide its utmost fierceness! The idea, also, that this tale is so very fine as not to be appreciated by common minds, and is therefore exempt from common criticism; that it is in what Mr. Willis would perhaps style a "Japonica" region of the poetic art, and only to be read after a purification, this idea which we have admitted as a supposed excuse for the uncouthness of the measure, is only admissible as such a supposition. For the characters and their motives are old and universal. The popularity of Madame Cottin's tale of the Exile of Siberia, shows how well the world understands the wealth and the depth of woman's affection. But it may be said, that though old and universal this affection is here in a highly refined form. Constancy, it may be urged, it is true, is only constancy whether clad in hoddin gray or pink satin, but that here it is clad in extremely choice raiment. 66 Now to this we must answer, and this conducts us to the general style of the piece, the clothing is not to our taste. It is not really fine, but tawdry; not neat, but gaudy. It pains the eye for want of harmony, and for ostentatious showiness in the coloring. To read the whole book cloys the fancy. The figures and comparisons seldom come in naturally, but are the offspring of conscious choice. The poet has always left him a conceit, a miserable conceit." There is not a simile in the piece resembling in its essence either of the three that Burns throws in with a single dash in Tam O'Shanter; not one that makes the picture burst upon the eye, and thrills the heart with its imaginative sympathy. But the similes in Milton, it may be said, which he strews in "thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa," are consciously chosen. Not so; though there are minds to whom they must always so appear, not being able to lift themselves up to the height of his greatness. The comparison in the extract quoted"Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed in the meadows," is neither suggested nor suggestive, neither natural nor well chosen, but forced, unapt and not new. To one who never had any agricultural experience, it may seem elegant; possibly to such an one it would come naturally; but to our apprehension it is a simile which is not only strained, but degrades rather than exalts. The last line in the extract is another forced simile: "When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music." But this is so pretty, that one cannot choose but pardon it. The author is not always so successful. Thus : "Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.' This is altogether too fine. It is sick ening. We cannot away with it. A writer who feeds American boarding-school misses with such bon-bons, is fair subject for mirth. He ought to be laughed out of the folly. Next thing his bust will appear in some barber's window in Broadway-if indeed the ideal is not there already. One would think this should suffice for the stars in one poem; but no :- of his nature to supply emotion where it is so evidently wanting. We can fancy that one should feel in reading many pas sages like this, and, indeed, the whole piece, that the writer is giving out in a calm and unnatural monotonous chant, feelings too deep to be allowed egress in spontaneous eloquence; just as many must remember to have felt, when it was common for college students to imitate the impressive oddity of Mr. Emerson's man "Over her head the stars, the thoughts of God in ner, at hearing some unfortunate, meek the heavens !" This is naughty: we fear we shall never meet Mr. Longfellow in the place he mentions, if he allows himself to use such expressions. Sometimes he is very ingenious, so much so, that it becomes a pleasure to anatomize his good things. Indeed, in this sense, the poem would not be so tedious, were we not called upon to feel at the same time for the grief of the unfortunate lovers. But there is just the difficulty. How one could elaborate so affecting a plot, in so minutely cool and trifling a manner, exercising his ingenuity on an unusual metre, and in discovering all sorts of pretty comparisons and expressions, passes comprehension. When, for example, his heroine grows old, he says:— "Then there appeared and spread faint streaks of gray on her forehead, Dawn of another life, that broke o'er her earthly horizon, As in the eastern sky the first faint streaks of the morning." The comparison of the turning gray of the hair to the dawn of the morning, has a pleasing fancifulness, but is certainly as remote from real pathos, as likening a boiled lobster to the same phenomenon.* The poet does not paint by such similes; they distract from his picture and attract to his ingenuity. The cool wit (using the word in its old acceptation) so predominates over the imagination, as to cause that faculty to dwindle into affectation. If the reader is moved by such writing, it is of his own accord, and out of the disposition 66 eyed, muddy-brained young gentlemen commune;" or as they would, perhaps, have phrased it, "let the within flow out into the universal." There is a perfect analogy between this poem and its style, and between their thinking and conversation; and it might be added, that the poetry and the thinking are both equidistant from the high and the true. For what degree of vital heat can be felt to exist in a style which gives birth to such flowers of rhetoric, as those we are quoting ?— “ Life had long been astir in the village, and i clamorous labor Knocked with its hundred hands at the golden gates of the morning." This is not lavender, mint, or marjoram. "flowers of middle summer;" but is more like rosemary and rue, that keep "seemlichen, that might grow on an iceberg. ing and savor" all winter; rather it is a "She saw serenely the moon pass Forth from the folds of a cloud, and one star follow her footsteps, As out of Abraham's tent young Ishmael wandered with Hagar!" The exclamation point is not ours; it is so in the original, and ends a chapter. The reader can attach to it no other legitimate astonishment at his own conception. significance, than as indicating the poet's But he is very fond of comparisons from Scripture: "The trumpet flower and the grape-vine Hung their ladder of ropes aloft like the ladder of Jacob, On whose pendulous stairs the angels ascending, descending, Were swift humming birds that flitted from blossom to blossom." * How much nearer the language of emotion is "the milky head of reverend Priam," in the orical passage the first player recites in Hamlet. Have the old painters, did Rembrandt, prayers and confessions Unto the night, as it went its way, like a silent represent Jacob's Dream with a rope lad- | Poured out their souls in odors, that were their der? The image, to our fancy, is as strange as the likeness of humming birds to angels. Jacob's ladder on Mount Washington, must surely be more like the original. "Wild with the winds of September Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel." The trees collectively could not have wrestled like Jacob, though any one of them might have been said to do so with perfect propriety. We observe the same slight inaccuracy in another place : Carthusian." If this had stopped with "odors," it would have been well; had it ended with "night," it would have been perhaps half as good; as it is, the whole is bad. The little kitten of a thought is pinched and pinched till it mews horribly. Let us leave it and pass to another : "Circles and sails aloft, on pinions majestic, the vulture, Like the implacable soul of a chieftain slaughtered in battle." "Their souls with devotion translated, So far would have been well, but— Rose on the ardor of prayer, like Elijah ascending to heaven." But here is a Scripture simile from the part of the poem where the reader is asked to be most moved. Evangeline has at last discovered her long-lost Gabriel among the sick in the hospital: “Hot and red on his lips still burned the flush of the fever, As if life, like the Hebrew, with blood had be sprinkled its portals, That the Angel of Death might see the sign This is a temperance in passion, not ac- Frequently we meet with a good thing spoiled by the same coldness that permits these unpleasing extravagancies. "On the river Fell here and there through the branches a This is very pretty indeed. The tremu- "By invisible stairs ascending and scaling the heavens." Now the motion of a high soaring vulture, though it be like going up circular stairs in respect that it goes round and round, yet in respect that it is a smooth equable motion, it is very unlike going up stairs. Why an implacable soul should go to heaven at any rate, we find no sufficient reason, unless it be to fill out the metre of a very rough line; but perchance Mr. Schoolcraft's Algic Researches might furnish one: we observe so many instances of minute memory of little particulars gleaned out of books of travel and thrust in for their own sake, that we are in constant danger of exposing our ignorance. Possibly there may be some superstition among the Indians-whom the author calls, but without giving any note for the authority, "the scattered tribes of Ishmael's children"-to the effect that implacable souls go to heaven, and up circular stairs. Where a simile occurs which is really expressive, it looks as if it had been laid away in a note-book and copied out for the occasion; thus:-Evangeline beheld the priest's face "without either thought or emotion, E'en as the face of a clock from which the hands have been taken." This would not be out of place in pleasant prose description: it occurs in what is Nearer and round about her, the manifold intended to be a very serious passage. A flowers of the garden little on the priest attempted to speak; his accents Faltered and paused on his lips, as the feet of a "but his heart was full, and | Evangeline's father was "stalworth and child on a threshold, Hushed by the scene he beholds, and the awful presence of sorrow." But how shall such a comparison as the following be classified?--The Notary has told Evangeline's father a story, which does not convince him, any more than it will the reader, but it puzzles him, so that he stood like a man who fain would speak but findeth no language; "And all his thoughts congealed into lines on his face, as the vapors Freeze in fantastic shapes on the window panes in the winter." It is sufficient to add to a list of such things, which might be extended to more than equal in number the pages of the poem, a few which are better: "In the dead of the night she heard the whispering rain fall Loud on the withered leaves of the sycamore tree by the window." "The tire of the cart-wheel Lay like a fiery snake coiled round in a circle of cinders." "Oft on sledges in winter, as swift as the swoop of the eagle, Down the hill-side bounding they glided away o'er the meadows." "Blown by the blast of fate like a dead leaf over the desert." These have as much naturalness and truth as any of their kind in the piece. But they are not very remarkable. Indeed, it may be observed of all this sort of writing, that where it is not strained it is common. Like singers who force their voices, the authors become incapable of sustaining a full, vigorous tone. The description of the heroine already given to show the effect of the verse, the doleful hexameters, will serve to show also the general tone of the style and the level of the thought and sentiment. So far as it is melodious and flowing it is pleasing, but with all its labored similes and studied common-place epithets, it fails to flash the picture upon the mind's eye with that imaginative power which is the soul of high descriptive poetry. We are told that vision at once and irresistibly a clear image ? Does this comparison bring into the On the contrary, the reader must first fancy an oak tree in winter, and consider wherein it resembles a stout old farmer, and then fall back upon the epithets, which are certainly not the most novel in the world. Stalworth, stately, and the like, have been used before-several times; perhaps they might be found in Mr. James's novels. The maiden was "fair;" she had "black eyes" that gleamed softly beneath the brown shade of her tresses; she was particularly fair when at noontide she carried ale to the reapers; (at that time of day, she would have seemed fairer to the reapers had she, if we may write a hexameter, Stood in the door of the kitchen and blown a tin horn for the dinner ;) fairer still was she when she went to church, where the bell sprinkled the air with holy sounds as the priest sprinkled the congregation with hyssop; fairest of all, celestially so, when she walked homeward serenely with God's benediction upon her. All this does not make us see her. "Serenely," it is true, is a good phrase; it brings an indistinct impression of a sweet young lady walking home from church, and thus affects the ear poetically. But taking the whole together as it stands, and how must Evangeline impress any fancy which is peopled with the beautiful forms of our elder English poets, and our best novelists, with the Shakspeare's ladies and Walter Scott's? Is she a worthy person to be introduced into such company? They would be ashamed of so insipid a creature; Perdita would never endure such a country maid. For with all her graces and different degrees of fairness, there is nothing of her but a name, and a faint impression, not of feminine characterlessness, but of softness. There is no soul in her. Fo seventeen she is so childish as to be silly What is told about her is told in such a way that while we forget the particulars there is nothing left that is general. This is perhaps because she is so very fine and delicate a creature that critics | "A lovely lady rode him fair beside, In truth a most lovely lady! "As one "Rapt with the rage of mine own ravished Through contemplation of those goodly sights Do kindle love in high conceited sprites, Upon what pitch or poetic ground-color was it supposed possible to work in such a consciously affected style, such "make believe good children" kind of thought and sentiment as appears in the passage which this goodly couplet concludes? Or what class of readers were supposed capable of relishing a work which should abound in passages like the following-baby-talk forced into a canter : "Bent like a laboring oar, that toils in the surf of the ocean, Bent, but not broken, by age was the form of the notary public; Shocks of yellow hair like the silken floss of the maize hung Over his shoulders; his forehead was high; and glasses with horn bows Sat astride on his nose with a look of wisdom supernal. Father of twenty children was he, and more than a hundred Children's children rode on his knee, and heard his great watch tick." This was intended probably to be a little pleasant touch of simple nature; but it is not. It is mere puerility. The painful obviousness of the intent is as fatal to humor as to pathos. Both need the ars celare artem, which is here entirely wanting. The last line is so plainly the work of a cold design, that it renders what might otherwise assist in bringing out a domestic picture seem purely goodyish. It would be a pretty thought for Dickens, in some passage where it would first strike But in Evangeline one is obliged to nothe fancy as funny; but here, especially tice every line. He is not permitted to at the beginning of a chapter, all the ose his attention in the story, in the pic-pleasure that should be derived from the ures, in the character, the thought, or nicety or novelty of the observation is utThe writer, with his sweet terly lost. It is belittling one's self to entences, his pile-driving hexameters, his write or read such stuff:strained similes and over-nice conceits, is ver directly before him, and whatever of warmth and beauty the kind reader is villing to behold, he must perceive "There from his station aloft, at the head of the table, the herdsman Poured forth his heart and his wine together in endless profusion. |