From Fraser's Magazine for April.

LONGFELLOW.*

character. A man's disposition is imaged in his bearing and features; and so long as his picture lasts, remote generations can form some guess respecting his moral frame, as well as his outward aspect. Not less vividly is a nation portrayed in its most important works; and so long as pyramids or amphitheatres, the cathedrals of the middle ages, or the fortresses, banks, custom-houses, or other industrial monuments of later times remain, each successive period and nation is forced, by a law of its nature, to leave be

MR. LONGFELLOW is, we believe, by many degrees the most popular of the American poets among English readers. Few volumes indeed of recent English poetry have had as large a circulation in this country as his, if we except Mr. Tennyson's. His faults are those which no reader can avoid seeing, consisting chiefly of an exuberance of imagery, and a tendency to the far-fetched and the extravagant. These are the dulcia vitia of youthful imagination, which commonly sober down of themselves without much aid from acrid criticism, in proportion as the imagina-hind the trophies of its greatness or a carition becomes more plastic in character, and is more intent on moulding a poem as a whole than on throwing the utmost possible brilliancy into its details. Mr. Longfellow also, like Southey, Scott, and not a few of our modern poets, is apparently too easily pleased with whatever he may chance to write to do his best on all occasions; many of his poems consequently are on inferior subjects, and seem to have been produced without "due provocation." This is bad policy in a poet; for posterity is sure to judge by the quantity as well as the quality of his works, and will be both too rich and too busy to separate, in all cases, the dross from the gold. We rejoice, however, to observe that the more Mr. Longfellow writes, and the more important the theme he chooses, the more does he justify that popular award which is far from being an infallible criterion of merit.

It is not in a literary point of view exclusively that the appearance of a true poet in a youthful nation excites our interest. Poetry carries with it ever a social and a philosophical significance likewise. Its character in this respect is of boundless importance; though it is a future age only which, from an impartial distance and a commanding height, can adequately interpret the lesson. A strong analogy has ever existed between the poetry of a particular age and race, and their moral

*Longfellow's Poems. London. 1852.

The Golden Legend, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. London. 1852. Bogue.

cature of its deformities. To this day the triumphal arches of Imperial Rome and the monastic remains of England bear witness to that moral and social system of which they were the exponents; they are the bones of the great animal extinct; and so long as they continue to moulder in the region of wind and cloud, not of dust, they will supply indications from which the comparative anatomy of a later age may draw its inferences. Of all the works, however, which an age bequeaths, there is none which illustrates its character at once so minutely and so comprehensively as its poetry. This circumstance is easily accounted for. The shallower class of poets, pre-occupied with little of their own, reflect, as in a mirror, the more evanescent traits of surrounding circumstance. The deeper poets, on the other hand, are men of large and strong minds, built up in the main by a multiform experience, both personal and imaginative; and as that experience, though methodized by a law of their internal being, has necessarily passed to them through external circumstances, they must needs preserve in their writings an idealized image of their time. Moreover, men of large minds are also for and as sympathies are not able, like aspirathe most part men of expansive sympathies, tions, to feed upon ideas, but attach themselves to details, great poets cannot but illustrate those details.

This position, we are aware, is in at least an apparent antagonism to principles com

deemed the best preliminary, as a mountain is best seen from the side of an opposite mountain; and finally, poets to whom simple nature was as a universe infinite and unfallen, of whose worship and of whose mandates, they were the priests and prophets in Orphic song, Of these classes the last three perhaps had the most intimate relations with the spirit of the age; but each illustrated its characteristics, and represented a habit of mind among us; and all taken together constitute no unfit exponent of a time, the architecture of which will also commemorate it in one of its most marked characters, that of syncretism or miscellaneousness.

monly received, and in which there is much truth. It will be asked, is not great poetry permanent poetry; and what interest, except for antiquarians, can attach to works, the excellence of which consists in the degree in which they illustrated a bygone age? The circumstances of an age once changed, its associations change also; the past returns not; new objects are brought into notice; old objects are combined in a new perspective, how then can distant times be expected to appreciate poetry of which it has lost the key? The answer to these questions consists in a distinction between the spirit of the age and the fashion of the day. The former is essential and belongs to the history of The same difficulties, inherent in a late our Humanity; the latter is accidental, and and critical age whose wealth surpasses its therefore ephemeral. The former is illus- wants, and whose table is too large for its trated by the deep poets; the latter by the digestion, exist in America, and have doubtsuperficial. That which is of a spiritual na- less not a little distracted poetic impulses ture only, and not the characteristics of the and aims. But America has other difficultime at large, can with propriety be called ties likewise. It is young as a nation; but the "spirit of the age." Recent times, for as a race it is not young. It is a portion of example, have had, at one side, an eminently England detached from the rest, and sent utilitarian tendency, while they are also dis- forward to accomplish its destinies alone, tinguished by very opposite tendencies; but with fewer aids, but with fewer contradicfew, we imagine, would cite Mr. Bentham as tions also, and with an ampler field. In its a chief exponent of the spirit of the age. physical and civil relations it was from the In proportion as an age is unspiritual, the first an island swelled to the colossal propordiscrepancy between its general characteris- tions of a continent; while, in its spiritual tics and its "spirit," properly so called, be- bearings it was cut off from that vast concomes greater. This circumstance is illus-geries of living traditions, social, political, trated by the singularly diverse character of modern poetry. The great outburst of poetry which has been witnessed in England within the present century, is by nothing more marked than by the multitude of its contrasted schools. We have had poets of modes and manners; poets like Ebenezer Elliot and Davis, who have endeavored to adapt to their lyres the discords of corn-law discussion, or repeal agitation; poets who have taken refuge from the tumult of the mart or the factory, in Turkish harems or Persian gardens, and who in so doing have added to the stock of poetic trinketry and literary furniture, if not to the stores of immortal verse. We have had poets who revived the graceful mirth and beneficent exuberance of the Italian bards; poets in whose works the fair images of Grecian mythology are revived with an antique purity, and delineated with an almost unerring pencil along the walls of a cloister, secluded indeed, though by no means ascetic. We have had poets of revolution, "voices prophesying war;" poets of philosophy and theology, for the study of whose works a previous acquaintance with Plato might be

imaginative, and religious, which blended in England, made one small island the meetingspot of two vast continents-the civilization of the Past and of the Present. Nor is this all. Nations derived by colonizations from nations already mature, and protected by the modern facilities of locomotion from physical or mercantile isolation, lose a portion of their intellectual inheritance, without gaining, at least for a long time, the new experiences evolved from a political career at once special and complete in itself. Physiologists tell us that man, at a very early stage of his existence, passes through a series of strange transformations. Whether or not this be physically true of the individual, it is, in a moral sense, true of nations, and perhaps most true of those whose richer and more manifold elements have occupied the longest historic periods in their development. Through what a series of changes have not the nations of Europe passed from barbarism to the sacerdotal type, the regal, the feudal, the aristocratical, the constitutional or representative; and what a rich deposit must not a stream that has wandered over so many soils have heaped up on the

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have supplied. For one of the conquering | Window,' 'The Builders,' Sand of the Derace thus to sing the lament of the conquered, sert in an Hour-glass.' Among the poems may be considered, perhaps, as but the dis- on slavery, The Slave's Dream,' and 'The charge of a debt of honor: Good Part that shall not be taken away,' rank high. Many others, also, seem to us to have very high merit ; especially 'The Occultation of Orion.' We shall, however, be doing Mr. Longfellow more justice if we proceed to give an account of his principal work.

TO THE DRIVING CLOUD.

Gloomy and dark art thou, oh chief of the mighty

Omawaws;

Gloomy and dark, as the driving cloud, whose

name thou hast taken!

Wrapt in a scarlet blanket, I see thee stalk through the city's

Narrow and populous streets, as once by the mar-
gin of rivers

Stalk those birds unknown, that have left us only
their foot-prints.
What, in a few short years, will remain of thy
race but the foot-prints;

How canst thou walk in these streets, who hast
trod the green turf of the prairies?
How canst thou breathe in this air, who hast
breathed the sweet air of the mountains?
Ah! 'tis vain that with lordly looks of disdain
thou dost challenge

Looks of dislike in return, and question these

walls and these pavements, Claiming the soil for thine hunting-grounds, while down-trodden millions

Starve in the garrets of Europe, and cry from its

caverns that they, too,

Have been created heirs of the earth, and claim its division!

Back, then, back to thy woods in the regions west of the Wabash!

There as a monarch thou reignest. In autumn,

the leaves of the maple

As the Golden Legend is the latest of Mr. Longfellow's poems, so it is the most important. The story of it may be briefly told. The prologue sounds the key-note to the deavor to tear down the cross, which surwhole. The powers of darkness vainly enmounts the Cathedral of Strasburg. Baffled by the spirits of Good, the saints and angels emblazoned in the windows and carved over the arch-ways, the Spirits of Tempest retire in despite, and the chief of them betakes himself to another task. Prince Henry of Hoheneck has long suffered from a strange disease. In his Castle of Vautsberg, on the Rhine, he meditates, in gloom, on his condition. The tempter enters in the garb of a travelling physician. The prince describes his malady,

My heart has become a dull lagoon,

Which a kind of leprosy drinks and drains,

and states that even the doctors of Salerno have pronounced it incurable, except upon impossible conditions. He must gradually wither away, unless saved by the blood of a maiden, who, of her own good will, offers her life in exchange for his. The strange physician holds up before him a flask, containing the far-famed elixir of perpetual youth. The prince drinks. For a moment his lost youth returns to him. His punishment follows His disease returns; and the prince, after publicly doing penance, as one who has dealt in the black art, is driven from his ancestral home,——

soon.

Clothed in a cloak of hodden gray,
And bearing a wallet and a bell,
Whose sound should be a perpetual knell,
To keep all travellers away.

We regret that we have not room for what, on the whole, we consider both the most important of Mr. Longfellow's minor poems, and the most interesting, as illustrative of America. We allude to the striking poem entitled, The Building of the Ship.' It does not need the last stanzas, in which the vessel receives the name of the Union, to tell us that in the mighty bark, built with such a stately strength, and so eager to tempt the perils of new seas, the destiny of The outcast takes refuge with the family America is shadowed forth. Neither need of a faithful retainer in the Odenwald. we say how cordially we hope that the pro- There is a great charm in the scene in phecies with which it concludes may be ful- which we are first made acquainted with filled. It abounds in beautiful passages; him in his retirement. He is reading the and the skill with which a two-fold interest old legend of "The Monk and the Bird," is worked out in it cannot escape the reader's with which many of our readers must have observation. Among the other shorter pieces become acquainted, in Mr. Trench's beautiour favorites are, The Reaper and the Flow-ful version of it. As he concludes, Elsie, ers,' The Secret of the Sea,' The Open the eldest daughter of his host, approaches