Chapter III: Kalevala (1)

But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and natural relation with the world about him, however little or however much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland--Kalevala.[1]

[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know, has not been printed.--C.E. NORTON.]

I am driven by my longing,
Of my thought I hear the summons
That to singing I betake me,
That I give myself to speaking,
That our race's lay I utter,
Song for ages handed downward.
Words upon my lips are melting,
And the eager tones escaping
Will my very tongue outhasten,
Will my teeth, despite me, open.

Golden friend, beloved brother,
Dear one that grew up beside me,
Join thee with me now in singing,
Join thee with me now in speaking,
Since we here have come together,
Journeying by divers pathways;
Seldom do we come together,
One comes seldom to the other,
In the barren fields far-lying,
On the hard breast of the Northland.

Hand in hand together clasping,
Finger fast with finger clasping,
Gladly we our song will utter,
Of our lays will give the choicest--
So that friends may understand it.
And the kindly ones may hear it.
In their youth which now is waxing,
Climbing upward into manhood:
These our words of old tradition,
These our lays that we have borrowed
From the belt of Wainamoinen,
From the forge of Ilmarinen,
From the sword of Kaukomeli,
From the bow of Jonkahainen,
From the borders of the ice-fields,
From the plains of Kalevala.

These my father sang before me,
As the axe's helve he fashioned;
These were taught me by my mother,
As she sat and twirled her spindle,
While I on the floor was lying,
At her feet, a child was rolling;
Never songs of Sampo failed her.
Magic songs of Lonhi never;
Sampo in her song grew aged,
Lonhi with her magic vanished,
In her singing died Wipunen,
As I played, died Lunminkainen.
Other words there are a many,
Magic words that I have taught me,
Which I picked up from the pathway,
Which I gathered from the forest,
Which I snapped from wayside bushes,
Which I gleaned from slender grass-blades,
Which I found upon the foot-bridge.
When I wandered as a herd-boy.
As a child into the pastures,
To the meadows rich in honey,
To the sun-begoldened hilltops,
Following the black Maurikki
By the side of brindled Kimmo.

Lays the winter gave me also,
Song was given me by the rain-storm,
Other lays the wind-gusts blew me,
And the waves of ocean brought them;
Words I borrowed of the song-birds,
And wise sayings from the tree-tops.

Then into a skein I wound them,
Bound them fast into a bundle,
Laid upon my ledge the burthen,
Bore them with me to my dwelling,
On the garret beams I stored them,
In the great chest bound with copper.

Long time in the cold they lay there,
Under lock and key a long time;
From the cold shall I forth bring them?
Bring my lays from out the frost there
'Neath this roof so wide-renownèd?
Here my song-chest shall I open,
Chest with runic lays o'errunning?
Shall I here untie my bundle,
And begin my skein unwinding?
* * * * *
Now my lips at last must close them
And my tongue at last be fettered;
I must leave my lay unfinished,
And must cease from cheerful singing;
Even the horses must repose them
When all day they have been running;
Even the iron's self grows weary
Mowing down the summer grasses;
Even the water sinks to quiet
From its rushing in the river;
Even the fire seeks rest in ashes
That all night hath roared and crackled;
Wherefore should not music also,
Song itself, at last grow weary
After the long eve's contentment
And the fading of the twilight?
I have also heard say often,
Heard it many times repeated,
That the cataract swift-rushing
Not in one gush spends its waters,
And in like sort cunning singers
Do not spend their utmost secret,
Yea, to end betimes is better
Than to break the thread abruptly.

Ending, then, as I began them,
Closing thus and thus completing,
I fold up my pack of ballads,
Roll them closely in a bundle,
Lay them safely in the storeroom,
In the strong bone-castle's chamber,
That they never thence be stolen,
Never in all time be lost thence,
Though the castle's wall be broken,
Though the bones be rent asunder,
Though the teeth may be pried open,
And the tongue be set in motion.

How, then, were it sang I always
Till my songs grew poor and poorer,
Till the dells alone would hear me,
Only the deaf fir-trees listen?
Not in life is she, my mother,
She no longer is aboveground;
She, the golden, cannot hear me,
'T is the fir-trees now that hear me,
'T is the pine-tops understand me,
And the birch-crowns full of goodness,
And the ash-trees now that love me!
Small and weak my mother left me,
Like a lark upon the cliff-top,
Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones
In the guardianship of strangers,
In the keeping of the stepdame.
She would drive the little orphan.
Drive the child with none to love him,
To the cold side of the chimney,
To the north side of the cottage.
Where the wind that felt no pity,
Bit the boy with none to shield him.
Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
Like a little bird to wander.
Silent, o'er the country straying
Yon and hither, full of sadness.
With the winds I made acquaintance
Felt the will of every tempest.
Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
Learned too well to weep of winter.

Yet there be full many people
Who with evil voice assail me,
And with tongue of poison sting me,
Saying that my lips are skilless,
That the ways of song I know not,
Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
Ah, you should not, kindly people,
Therein seek a cause to blame me,
That, a child, I sang too often,
That, unfledged, I twittered only.
I have never had a teacher,
Never heard the speech of great men,
Never learned a word unhomely,
Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
Others to the school were going,
I alone at home must keep me,
Could not leave my mother's elbow,
In the wide world had her only;
In the house had I my schooling,
From the rafters of the chamber.
From the spindle of my mother,
From the axehelve of my father,
In the early days of childhood;
But for this it does not matter,
I have shown the way to singers,
Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
Here shall be the way in future,
Here the track at last be opened
For the singers better-gifted,
For the songs more rich than mine are,
Of the youth that now are waxing,
In the good time that is coming!

Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos. Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of "Faust." Doubtless the material of original poetry lies in all of us, but in proportion as the mind is conventionalized by literature, it is apt to look about it for models, instead of looking inward for that native force which makes models, but does not follow them. This rose of originality which we long for, this bloom of imagination whose perfume enchants us--we can seldom find it when it is near us, when it is part of our daily lives.

REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES

HENRY JAMES

JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES[1]

[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr. Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co. _Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]

Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr. James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native endowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought; senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor. But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore, are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind. Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an irresponsible _trouvère_. If he allow himself an occasional carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they are. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of an intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr. James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.

We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations, are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset, Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like _bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, without being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster. Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association, for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.

But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr. James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him. We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity. He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr. James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ (Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice," or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose. But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable and helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of the Albani Antinoüs. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr. James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things. Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand, superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the various weather of temperament.

Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the Old World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lights and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque impression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to say, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that a man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne, with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the question.

Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it, for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us "Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.

LONGFELLOW

THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH

The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure Letters" (1592) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster" (1570), had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyls, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says:

I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I
also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or
chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime
gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that
it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in
_Carpenter_; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when
it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that
draweth one legge after hir and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one
sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a _Diastole_, is
like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne
with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a
God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our
owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the
Quantitie to the Verse?

The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use and wont.

We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by position, in virtue of its place on his head.

Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head to be fóund out;
Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious áffayres;
Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;
_Eyed_ like to _Argus_, _Earde_ like to _Midas_, _Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
Winged like to _Mercury_, fittst of a Thousand for to be émployed.

And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the "Aeneid."

Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,
And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses
So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans), etc.

Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--

Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed.

Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that his prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme" (1603), one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his "Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their grave beauty and strength.

The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His "Odyssey" (1783), his "Iliad" (1791), and his "Luise" (1795), were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having given the model for Canning's "Knife-grinder." The exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of our language was unfriendly to them.

It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of the Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but "Evangeline" (1847), though encumbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets. Clough's "Bothie"--poem whose singular merit has hitherto failed of the wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long after; and Kingsley's "Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.

While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow into prose,--as in the verse

Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,

and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style in other metres, as where he says

Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,

using a word as essentially unpoetic as "surtout or pea-jacket." We think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of phrase.

But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot associate sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot Desmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.

Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the great poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr. Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done, because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers, which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without them, is as perfect as anything in the language.

Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type of strength.

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN

It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air. If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who imported a finer foreign culture into our poetry.

His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment with which literature has been convulsed of late,--as if the main object were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his ears,--that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like an escape from noise to nature.

As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with the foreign nature of the subject as such,--for any good matter is American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent" is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland, where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros," which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.

WHITTIER

IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS

It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect sympathy between the two sections.

Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of _conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that. By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper, akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he often catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thing from the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such, are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy; for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing. Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.

Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on, and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS

The natural product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. _His_ verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse, that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to think of--_ancora ci raccappriccia!_ Against a copy of verses signed "B.B.," as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so many years ago, we should warn our incautious offspring as an experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B.B. shot. It behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes carry about all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas of another B.B., who, under the title of "Boston Bard," whilom obtained from newspaper columns that concession which gods and men would unanimously have denied him.

George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it might be, was surely not of that kind "that never was on land or sea." There has been much that was poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in the men themselves. Poetry demands a richer and more various culture, and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate for the waste of human life as the Journal of an average Quaker. Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.

Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly blossomed at last, and Nature, who can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice between Puritan and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not forgiven the Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires them for all that, calls on his countrymen as

Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a stern "Thus saith the Lord,"

and at heart, we suspect, has more sympathy with Miles Standish than with Mary Dyer. Indeed,

Sons of men who sat in meeting with their broadbrims o'er their brow,
Answering Charles's royal mandate with a _thee_ instead of _thou_,

would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier may lack, he has the prime merit that he smacks of the soil. It is a New England heart he buttons his straight-breasted coat over, and it gives the buttons a sharp strain now and then. Even the native idiom crops out here and there in his verses. He makes _abroad_ rhyme with _God_, _law_ with _war_, _us_ with _curse_, _scorner_ with _honor_, _been_ with _men_, _beard_ with _shared_. For the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest we can make no terms whatever,--they must march out with no honors of war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give a flavor of _essence-pennyr'y'l_ to the very Beatitudes. It differs from Lowland Scotch as a _patois_ from a dialect.

But criticism is not a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil might have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry and hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets, "You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women--in short, the entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere"; and when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of approval. But it is all _bosh_, nevertheless. Nature is _not_ the same here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an ideal background is nothing. We may claim whatever merits we like (and our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did they bring with them but the good old Devil, with his graminivorous attributes, and even he could not stand the climate. Neither horn nor hoof nor tail of him has been seen for a century. He is as dead as the goat-footed Pan, whom he succeeded, and we tenderly regret him.

Mr. Whittier himself complains somewhere of

The rigor of our frozen sky,

and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests, but should not be carried too high above-ground. Without this, however, he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than any of its forerunners, and is full of the most charming rural pictures and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see

the old swallow-haunted barns,
Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
Through which the moted sunlight streams.
And winds blow freshly in to shake
The red plumes of the roosted cocks
And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,--

the cattle-yard
With the white horns tossing above the wall,