Religion of "Evangeline." 401 Socinian; but we should have guessed him to be such from the air of unreality about all the portions of "Evangeline" in which the life and doctrines of Christianity are brought in for artistical effect. The inhabitants of Grand Pré are a great deal too good. They "lack gall to make oppression bitter," and are robbed of their most sacred rights, for which they were bound, as good Christians, to fight to the death, as easily as a flock of sheep are brought to the slaughter. There are occasions when Christians, as members of a community, are bound to do their very best towards confounding and slaying their fellow-creatures by whom they are attacked. Such an occasion was that which is represented by Mr. Longfellow as having happened to the inhabitants of Acadia. Let any Christian, English, Scottish, or Irish, fancy that the news had reached him one fine morning, that a French army had taken steps towards "deporting" him and his from their rightful soil, and assuming possession of his property-wife and daughters perhaps included: would his wrath be calmed, and his resistance stopped by such words as Father Felician's address to the simple Acadians? "In the midst of the tumult and strife of angry contention, Is this the fruit of my toils, of my vigils, and prayers, and privations? Let us repeat that prayer, in the hour when the wicked assail us; If any preacher were foolish enough thus to address good Christians so situated, we trust that he would get well laughed at for his pains, and duly censured by his authorities, for his gross misinterpretation and mis-application of Scriptural precepts: but the foolish Acadians repented them forthwith of their righteous wrath and impulse to resistance, and "Responded Not with their lips alone, but their hearts; and the Ave Maria Sang they, and fell on their knees; and their souls with devotion transported Rose, on the ardour of prayer, like Elijah ascending to heaven." Our pity for Gabriel, the betrothed of the fair maiden, Evangeline, is certainly much diminished by knowing that he is one of this congregation of spoonies. From the extracts we have given, our readers will see that the language of "Evangeline" is very far from answering to Coleridge's standard of poetical phraseology-" the best words in the best places." Mr. Longfellow's words are commonly about as well chosen as those of a first-rate novel writer. The true poet's invincible determination to hunt up from the recesses of his memory, the word or words which absolutely express his thought or feeling, is nowhere visible. He would, no doubt, think it great fastidiousness and loss of time, to spend half a day in getting a stanza quite right, which he has worked up to a "passable' point in half an hour. He has no sufficient feeling of the fact, that a poem is like the mirror of a telescope in this-that it is the last rub which polishes it, and makes it capable of reflecting the heavens. Many are the poets who have nearly scaled Parnassus, and who might have won to themselves enduring names, but that, discouraged by finding the mountain-side barren of laurels, they have refused the labour of the few additional steps which would have brought them to its verdant top. But Mr. Longfellow's words are not only not the best words, they are not even in the best places. This is an inexcusable fault in a metre so extremely easy as that of "Evangeline." Inversions merely for the sake of getting the long and short syllables into due order, are never allowable, except in highly polished verse, where this, and other apparent carelessnesses, may be introduced with good effect to take off the appearance of laborious finish. Inversions are always allowable for rhythmical effect, which is quite a different thing from mere metrical regularity. No one can wish that Cleopatra, in her wilful passion, should have exclaimed, instead of "Give me Mandragora to drink!" "Give me to drink Mandragora!" Or that the waves and winds that did omit Longfellow's Minor Poems. "Their mortal natures, letting go safely by The divine Desdemona," 403 should have flowed, in Shakespeare's verse, with more regulalarity; but Mr. Longfellow's inversions are seldom if ever of this character; he rarely becomes sufficiently rhythmical, and never sufficiently polished, in his writings, to justify inversions upon either of the foregoing pleas. Notwithstanding all these, and other complaints which we might justly make against this poem, we gladly allow that it possesses very considerable merit as a versified romance. The numerous descriptions combine breadth with minuteness of detail very happily, and the story, which is decidedly a fine one, is told so as to work upon the feelings, and to elevate them. We say again that, in these remarks, we have laid disproportionate emphasis upon the blame deserved by the poem, because we consider that the praise which it has obtained has been out of all proportion to its deserts. Mr. Longfellow has written a very poor drama, called "The Spanish Student." We cannot find in it any passages worth placing before our readers; but there is one stage-direction which gives so amusing an example of American "notions" of European manners, that we must quote it. The heroine, Preciosa, is a Spanish gipsy-girl, a famous danseuse; the Archbishop of Toledo has taken it into his head to put down the ballet in his diocese, and by way of ascertaining the full odiousness of the abuse to be extirpated, the Archbishop summons Preciosa to dance before him at his palace : "She lays aside her mantilla. The music of the cachucha is played, and the dance begins. The Archbishop and the Cardinal look on with gravity and an occasional frown; then make signs to each other; and, as the dance continues, become more and more pleased and excited, and at length rise from their seats, throw their caps in the air, and applaud vehemently as the scene closes." "The Golden Legend" is a long poem of the worn-out Faust type, in which the devil is laid under contribution for a certain amount of theatrical effect, worldly wisdom, and would-be bitter sarcasm. There are, however, in this poem, two or three very beautiful passages, which we would willingly quote had we space; but we must hasten to close this notice of Mr. Longfellow with a few extracts from and comments upon his minor poems. These pieces, upon the whole, do not deserve anything like the degree of popularity which they have obtained; indeed, the great reputation which two or three of these poems enjoy, is a most melancholy sign of the poverty of the intellectual, and still more of the spiritual culture, of a very large portion of the "reading public." The following verses, entitled "A Psalın of Life: what the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist," have come to be quoted in our English House of Commons--a place not yet penetrated, if we remember rightly, by Tennyson, or even, except for ridicule, by Wordsworth. "Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! "Life is real! Life is earnest ! And the grave is not its goal! "Art is long and time is fleeting, And our hearts though stout and brave, "In the world's broad field of battle, Be not like dumb driven cattle; "Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Heart within, and God o'erhead! We can make our lives sublime, Sailing o'er life's troubled main, Learn to labour and to wait." A certain Frenchman, not being quite master of our language, is reported to have exclaimed, in a rapture of admiration at something or other, "superbe! magnifique! in short, pretty well!" This exclamation expresses the sort of feeling one has upon reading verses like the above for the first time. It is flattering to find that one's most commonplace opinions are thought worthy of being expressed with such astounding emphasis; and we experience, upon reading them, much the same sort of self-complacency as was felt by the bourgeois gentilhomme upon discovering, for the first time, that he had been talking prose all his life. But when the first glow of self-love has subsided, we begin to be ashamed of ourselves, for having been duped by such a bundle of loud-tongued and "unimproved" commonplaces; and if we are very good-humoured and not very critical, we shall hush up the business with an "in short, pretty well." But we the intelligent critics of the North British Review-cannot reconcile our consciences to any such amiable concealment of the real truth, which, in regard to the above verses, and many others like them in Mr. Longfellow's volume, is simply this, that they are, for the most part, pretentious, unprofitable, anti-Christian trash. What an unconscionable puppy the "young man" must have been-in the moment at least when his "heart" set up this "Psalm" in opposition to the words of the Psalmist! How the "man after God's own heart" would have quailed beneath this "sprightly Juvenal's" reproof! How much wholesome doctrine he lost by living so many centuries before this magnificent discovery of Mr. Longfellow's, that "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal." We could be very funny at Mr. Longfellow's expense, had we space to enter into a philosophical analysis of this "Psalm of Life;" but we have to quote another famous effusion called "EXCELSIOR. "The shades of night were falling fast, "His brow was sad; his eye beneath "In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a groan, |