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ART. III.-1. The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. G. Routledge and Co. 1851.

2. Prose Works of Henry W. Longfellow. London: William Tegg and Co.

IN the late Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, America was distinguished by the excellence of the articles which she contributed rather than by their quantity or variety. Whilst the famous lock-the rival of Bramah's patent-Colt's revolver, a reaping machine, and a few other mechanical inventions, proved the scientific capabilities of Cousin Jonathan, the Greek Slave afforded decisive evidence that, in the region between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, there are, besides constructive talent, power of imagination and delicacy of finished taste. Of one class, however, of the fruits of the intellect, even the stupendous enclosure near the Serpentine offered no specimens ; for poems, histories, treatises, and the productions of the daily or quarterly press-after all, the best illustrations of a nation's life-could, of course, find no room in the amplest building. These must be sought for in the cottages and library-shelves of the country to which they owe their birth, or of other lands which have imported them. Regarded in this point of view, it is no less strange than true that America presents to the enquirer directly the reverse of the results of her mechanical and artistic labours. Thought is so unfettered, and publication so clear of fiscal restrictions in the United States, that almost every village has its newspaper and boasts its poet; and, whilst penny-aliners abound, verses are pretty well saleable by the ell, like cottons or cambrics. But, amidst the multiplicity of production, superlative excellence still remains unattained; and during the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since the battles of independence were fought and won, in not more than a dozen instances, if so many, has anything been struck off in the Mint of the Muses in advance of mediocrity.

This may partly be accounted for by the difference between mechanism and poetry. The mechanist begins by learning all that his predecessors have discovered, and first constructs elaborate contrivances after a model with which they have supplied him; and thus, gradually warming in his study, lights on improved methods of construction; or, aided by a chance suggestion or lucky hit, launches out into bold invention. Thus mechanism, and science in general, is continued,

like contiguous piles or successive stories of a vast and neverfinished building; what has already been achieved serving as the stepping-stone or foundation towards the accomplishment of what remains to be done. It may be compared to the hyperbola of the cone dilating out to infinity. Poetry is totally unlike in kind. Each poem is an individual performance, not a continuation of preceding efforts, but distinct and complete in itself, and so far resembling the ellipse or circle. Whatever region in the realms of fancy a past bard has occupied is thenceforth his own, and guarded against the intrusion of any other claimant. Thus, whilst the mechanician is benefitted in every sense by the progress made by his predecessors, he who would earn the laurel of Parnassus finds most of its leaves already plucked, and is even oppressed by the names of compatriots who have anticipated him in the same walk.

If, however, this reasoning is deemed inadequate explanation, we may resort to the old adage that "Poeta nascitur, non fit." Poetic genius has been universally judged a special boon from heaven, and only improvable to a certain extent. The poetic seed falls only occasionally: it has never descended at all in some countries-in others only at great intervals of time, and rich abundance has been followed by a period of dearth. Thus, amongst most nations the age or ages in which their illustrious poets have flourished are distinctly definable. In Greece there was the Homeric age, and later the dramatic era of Eschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides. Rome enjoyed her Augustan period of golden writers. In Italy, Dante, Bocaccio, and Petrarch, were nearly contemporaries; and subsequently Ariosto and Tasso. In England the ages of Elizabeth, of the Charleses, of Anne, and the close of the last and beginning of the present century, have been illumined by the splendour of the literary productions. Germany exhibited a sudden burst of poetic genius after protracted sterility for many centuries; and who is competent to decide that destiny may not have in store for the Saxon inhabitants of the new world an affluence of talent which shall recall to the mind the master-spirits of their father-land? At present there has not been much more than the twittering and chirping of some humbler species of the feathered tribe: the note of the whip-poor-will: the melodious piping of the blackbird: no magnificent songster has been heard. The greatest that has yet appeared is unquestionably Longfellow.

The critic has frequently as much difficulty in classifying a new poet as the entomologist finds with some novel pheno

menon of the moth or sphinx family. The Americans have not originated any new school of poetry, and it may be a matter of question to which of the old, Longfellow may be most correctly said to belong. For the sake of distinctness the modern schools of Anglo-Saxon poets may be divided into three great classes.

There is, first, the impassioned order, who have endeavoured, like those who stand the foremost on the scroll of the Muses, to derive celebrity from a searching analysis of the heart and a graphic portraiture of its various emotions; but have more or less failed by substituting effect for truth. Of this class Byron is the prince. His writings resemble a port-folio crowded with strongly marked and powerfully drawn likenesses, every countenance flashing with the fire of some ungoverned desire, or distorted under the influence of some terrible convulsion of the feelings. The state of mind which produces such poetic representations is one-sided and morbid. Love is the key-note of the strain; and humanity is always pictured in an agony of some sort-of love, or hatred, or violent desire, or despondency: the fires of the volcano are rumbling internally, or the eruption is desolating the most beauteous scenes of nature. Such delineators of humanity are themselves for the most part the victims of overbearing and very ill-regulated appetites or passions; and hence, unable to see human life as it is, and always embrowning it with a reflection cast from their own disordered fancies and emotions, they leave the impress of their fictitious or exaggerated notions on their works. Moore, and a multitude of nambypamby writers of feebler pinion, may be classed in this order, which was extremely popular some years ago, and still reckons numerous admirers particularly among the young. Pope was, perhaps, the founder of the school, which was rather modelled after a French type. As regards the tendency of such a literature it may be doubted whether the avowedly sensual poetry of the era of Charles II. was prolific of a larger aggregate of moral evil than the prurient compositions in which revolting coarseness is refined by the delicacy of the drapery which ornaments without concealing.

Altogether antagonistic to this school is another which came before it was contemporary-and will long live after it -that of the students of Nature as it is, who spread their easel with colours imitated from the life. The distinguishing feature of this class of poetry is simplicity. It is, in fact, the national school; for writers who derive their patterns of external objects from the objects themselves, without impart

ing the hues of their own imagination to them, or dilating or contracting their dimensions beyond the reality, are of course the only trustworthy representatives of national habits and ideas. It is also the most classical school; for the finished productions of Greece and Rome are pervaded by what constitutes the essence of good writing, and contain the very salt which alone gives immortality and preserves the flavour unimpaired through a succession of ages-Truth. In this school, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, of more recent poets, occupy prominent posts; and, were we to refer to a more remote period, the fathers of English verse would appear at the head of sons worthy of their descent. The moral and religious character exercise an immense influence on the creations of genius; and, whilst morbid compositions have a deteriorating effect and generate only depraved predilections, the healthy tone, manly vigour, and truthful delineations, of the genuine poetic mind instruct, elevate, and improve.

The remarkable development of literary power in Germany ere long wrought its result in England, and contributed to form what is best known as the "Lake School" of poetry. Its characteristics are sufficiently obvious. Passion is not its realm so much as those vague notions and undefined cravings and aspirations, which, imbedded in our intellectual and moral structure, underlie that palpable surface of affections and desires beyond which ordinary observers do not care to penetrate. This deeper and more inward life of man is the shrine and sanctuary of poesy; and it is not in venturing within its guarded and veiled precincts that the poets of this order differ from their brother bards of another order, but rather in an affectation of profundity which is quite as patent in their writings as its actual existence. They are pleased with fancying that they drop the plummet deeper than it has been sunk before; and, if they fail to bring up some sparkling treasure, at least cheat the ear with the echo of the sound which their line made in descending. There is, however, in their style an occasional transition from elaborate mystification to an excess of simplicity which encroaches very narrowly on puerility. It is as though they would fling their fingers their broadest span, and ring a diapason, striking every chord in humanity, "from its lowest note to the top of its compass.' The smoke and clouds of language sometimes shroud a descending deity: sometimes there is mere vapour and no deity at all. Really profound thinkers are rarely obscure; and although Shakspeare sounded every cavern of the heart, and

with cautious boldness explored the dreamy land of speculation, he is always intelligible: he never built a cloud-capt Babel of soaring words; puzzled his own brain and the reader's by enquiring what in the world he could mean; and then referred it to Apollo to unriddle verses more mysterious than those inscribed on the fluttering leaves of the Cumaan sibyl. This class of poetry, styled philosophical, is at present much in vogue. In Keble and even Tennyson there is a family resemblance to Coleridge and to Wordsworth, who may be regarded as the types of the class.

Whoever will attentively peruse Longfellow's poetical writings will, we think, arrive at the same conclusion that we have come to, that he properly belongs to the school of which we treated second in order of the three which recent times have witnessed. It is his own maxim-" In character, in manners, in style, the supreme excellence is simplicity;" and, although many deliver a precept to which they never conform in practice, his own example evinces but little and rare deviation from the truth he maintains in theory. There is, indeed, the extensive learning of the professor peeping out at many corners and crevices in his works: over all that he has written there is thrown the polish of scholar-like finish; but even his attachment to the German language and thorough acquaintance with its greatest interpreters, with whom he seems occasionally pleased to stand tiptoe on the border of " Cloud-land" and gaze into the dreamy domain, have not perverted that common sense which is the secret of simplicity, and therefore the basis of excellence in any kind of composition. The native temperament is genial and cheerful: the redolence of home which breathes strong and pure in his writings is, no doubt, exhaled from his own domestic habits; and, although the religious bias is latitudinarian, there is an impressiveness in his enunciations of solemn truth, or suggestive allusions to its lessons, which finds its own way to the heart. His greatest intellectual gift is, perhaps, a wild and exuberant imagination, winging its airy way with ease from one department of nature or science to another, and picking up its treasures in many climes and many volumes of ancient lore as well as modern; and it is this playfulness of fancy, grave and grotesque by turns-humorous without being satirical, and sportive without an approach to levity-which constitutes the principle charm of his verse and prose alike. With such endowments and acquirements it would, nevertheless, be absurd to represent Longfellow as taking his rank in the noblest choir of the sons of the Muses. His steps are in the right direction; and he is