and Greek. Be this as it may, the destiny of "Evangeline" is secure for an age, if not for all time—for the story of the maiden and her betrothed, cruelly sundered, and strangely and too briefly re-united, has come with power to
Thousands of aching brains, when theirs no longer are busy.
And not alone for maidens in Norman caps and homespun kirtles is it to repeat by the evening fire Evangeline's story—not for a few Acadian peasants, yet left in the forest primeval, to recount the tender tradition; for it is imprinted now among the household words of two hemispheres, and is dear to
All who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion.
But if "Evangeline" shall live, there are shorter pieces from the same hand that shall outlive her. Among a crowd of poetical miscellanies we may name "Excelsior (Longfellow)"—of which one well-known critic has enthusiastically declared, that he can no more conceive of a world without it than of a world without the chefs d'œuvre of Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton. "That figure, climbing the evening Alps, in defiance of danger, of man's remonstrance, and the far deeper fascination of woman's love, is a type of man struggling, triumphing, purified by suffering, perfected in death." Who has not been stirred and bettered by cet appel héroïque qui dit à l'humanité: Montons au Capitole! Each stanza is a picture, and by a master—by one who is at once the consecrated teacher, and the sympathising man and brother. "The Psalm of Life," "The Light of Stars," "The Reaper and the Flowers," "It is not always May," are all beautiful—some of them Æolian harp-like in airy harmony, and sinking into the soul like, what they profess to be, voices of the night.
Passing over not a few works of varied merit and power, in poetry and in prose,—the "Belfry of Bruges," "Outre-Mer," the translations from different European languages (especially Tegnér's "Children of the Lord's Supper"), &c.—a few words may be devoted to Mr. Longfellow's two novelets, "Hyperion: a Romance," and "Kavanagh."
With all its beauties, "Hyperion" reads like a disorderly series of analecta from the professor's common-place book. Everything smacks of second-hand—the sentiment, the story, the philosophy, the criticism, the style. The entire romance might have been made up of translations from German authorship—bow a rhapsody from Jean Paul, the "Only One"—now an excerpt from Goethe, the Many-sided—in this chapter an adaptation from the transcendentalism of Fichte—in the next an abstract of some Callot curiosity by Hoffmann—ballad fragments from Uhland interwoven with persiflage from Heine, and legends in the manner of Tieck interspersed with lachrymosities from Matthison. But the book is highly acceptable to tourists in Germany, always provided the said tourists have souls above Westphalia hams and Bologna sausages, and have heard of the prose-poet of Baireuth and the constellated poets of Weimar. Paul Flemming, the "hero," is two or three removes at least from originality; but he interests us—as an open soul, traveling and travailing in sorrow deep and strong—whose household gods have been broken, and his home razed, and who goes abroad that the sea may be between him and the grave, although "between him and his sorrow
