to do this, but the threat of punishment would hold down his hands as if they were in fetters. But if you proceed to a still higher teaching; if you advance from the negative to the positive duties of morality; if you insist on it that we ought to help each other, to act for the benefit of others as well as ourselves; if, in short, you wish to teach such a man the higher law, 'Love one another '-you will find that you have a blank wall before you. As well talk to the crags as knock at that man's door. A high moral truth is also, in its very nature, a noble and exalted feeling. It is this, or it is nothing but a string of words. If we say, with any genuine meaning, This flower is beautiful, we must feel its beauty. That the flower produces this feeling is precisely the truth we have to enunciate. And so in moral truth, if we say of any action that it is generous or amiable, we must feel its generosity, we must respond to its amiability. We must have some generosity in our own hearts, or we cannot even understand the virtue of generosity.

This truth, plain as it may seem, is often overlooked by those who exalt the intellect at the expense of the affections. Most unnecessarily; for affections without the intellect would be a mere chaos, while, on the other hand, intellect in the presence of morality and religion would be simply impossible without the affections. It is not, of course, to poetry that we owe the abundant affections of the human heart. Poetry springs from them; but it reacts to intensify, exalt, and refine them. Perhaps it will be said that feelings of all kinds, bad as well as good, are evoked by the poet, and mingle in that excitement he is bent on creating. This may be the case, but, here as elsewhere, it is by collision with error that truth is made manifest. It is the conflict of feeling that calls forth the Reason, and advances her to her post of observation, where she overlooks, selects, controls. You must first have the streams flowing copiously over the country before you can enter on the task of guiding them into the best channels. Where there is no literature of imagination there will be whole tracks of great aridity: where there is no higher literature there will be the mischief of partial inundation. While we write, Mr. Rawlinson's massive volume, 'The 'Five Great Monarchies,' lies open before us, and our eye rests on the following passage:

The great cause of this difference between ancient and modern Chaldæa is the neglect of the water-courses. Left to themselves the rivers tend to desert some portions of the alluvium wholly, which thus become utterly unproductive, while they spread themselves out over others, which are converted thereby into pestilential

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swamps. A well-arranged system of embankments and irrigating canals is necessary in order to develop the natural capabilities of the country, and to derive from the rich soil of the vast alluvium the valuable and varied products it can be made to furnish.'

The application that suggests itself need hardly be expressed. There are other waters than those of Chaldæa which demand careful husbanding in one place and careful dispersion in another.

We have often thought that an interesting work might be written, wherein our poets should be reviewed as representatives of our several tempers, feelings, opinions; our different modes, in short, of looking upon human life, and reading the great riddle of existence. It might be called The Philosophy of the Poets. The Epicurean and the Misanthrope, as well as the Christian and the Philanthropist, must of course be admitted.

no fear about the result of such a contrast. This mode of reviewing our poets would be in harmony with our modern spirit of criticism, which has grown impatient of discussing mere forms of composition or artifices of language. Our English poets would represent almost every scheme of thought that has grown out of human life, or that claims to regulate that life. Pope, Young, Cowper! how the very names call up distinct shades of philosophy and religion. Moore, Byron, Wordsworth! does it not seem as if Pleasure, and Misanthropy, and the faith that grows out of Benevolence, had each retained its minstreladvocate to plead its cause before the world? And the world listens, and is moved to its inmost heart, and finally grasps some great truth with renewed energy. Such a mode of reviewing our poets would also vividly illustrate that development of thought which we specifically call the history of philosophy. For while each age has its champions of Pleasure or Meditation, these champions do, in each age, feel the influence of the prevailing modes of philosophic thought. Shakspeare was contemporary with Bacon; and mark how the philosophy of Locke influences the poetry that followed after it; and note again how, in a later time, when it was felt that the human intelligence needed wider or deeper channels than the Essay on the Understanding' had provided for it, how poetry also overflows all the old embankments, and there is a season of riotous speculation, distinguished, it may be, by much confusion and dismay, but also by a marvellous prodigality of thought.

He whose name we have put at the head of our paper can hardly be said to have a place amongst these representative poets. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who has just sent us most opportunely from the other side of the Atlantic a new

volume of poems, is not altogether of that strength that he should be selected as the champion of any one mode of thought or class of opinions, neither has he thrown himself enthusiastically into any speculative cause. Perhaps it may be said that he represents the prevailing sentiments of the middle class of people, both in his own country and in England. Happily for himself, and (notwithstanding what we have said of the ultimate benefit of the clash and conflict of opposing sentiments) happily for his readers, he is one whose heart is in repose on the greatest questions which can agitate the human intellect. It is the tendency of his mind rather to dwell on the past than the future. Mediæval times have had a great charm for him; and when he quitted these it was to mount higher in the stream of time, and the Norseman's Edda took the place of the golden legends. He is a scholarly poet, tender and religious; not deficient in a decided personality, but still gathering his materials much from books, and seeing nature and mankind by the aid of that light which former poets have thrown upon them.

We have said that this new volume, 'Tales of a Wayside Inn,' has come opportunely, because we more than ever must value every bond of union, however slight, that keeps us in friendly intercourse with our fellow-Norsemen across the Atlantic; and a common language, a common literature, and the interchange of products of genius cordially admired on both sides, is not a tie altogether so slender that it can be spoken of with contempt. We hasten to welcome this latest gift from America. But before we proceed to notice the poems collected here under the perhaps not very appropriate title of Tales of a Wayside Inn,' we would glance back for a moment at those old favourites which have made the name of Longfellow as familiar and as dear amongst us as it can possibly be amongst his fellow-countrymen ; we would say a few words on the general character and merit of his poetry.

The distinctive merit of his poetry we should say is Pathos, and that grace and harmony which in poetry is so intertwined with the pathetic that it is hardly possible to separate them. It is no disparagement to Longfellow that he often seizes upon some circumstance or scene, or point of view, which preceding writers had already thrown their poetry over: the only question worth asking is how he himself has dealt with them. When he stands upon the 'Bridge,' or looks up to the blank in the 'Open 'Window,' or watches at his work the Village Blacksmith,' does he stir our heart? does the tear almost steal into our eyes? We need not answer the question we have asked, for the public, both in England and in America, have answered it long ago.

Not a

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few of his brief lyrical pieces have become familiar to us as household words. That heroic lady who, beyond any of her sex, won the whole heart of England, has received no poetic tribute to her memory comparable to the Santa Philomena' of Longfellow. He has made Florence Nightingale the popular saint of both hemispheres. We must not indulge ourselves in quoting our old favourites, or we should soon fill several pages with beautiful extracts known to every one. In the verse of Longfellow (wherever he writes what in English literature is understood to be verse) we notice a grave melody that fills the ear and never cloys it. It is curious to remark how, in metres that scan exactly alike, each original poet contrives to give a music of his own. And when we think of the grave subdued melody of Longfellow's verse, we the more regret that he has dealt so largely in what can be neither called verse nor prose, and especially in that curious indescribable jingle which is to pass for the English representative of the Latin hexameter. In this latter experiment he, like others, was tempted, we presume, by his classical tastes, by a wish to reproduce in English something which had pleased 'him in Latin or Greek. However natural and excusable such an attempt may be, we think by this time that our scholar-poets ought to be convinced that the experiment has failed. No one who approaches the English hexameter without such classical reminiscences ringing in his ear; no one who really loves the melody of verse, and who takes up this pedantic or dilettante manufacture simply as English verse-can, we think, derive any pleasure from it. As to the rhymeless sing-song in which our poet has preserved for us the legends of the Red Indian, this does not provoke from us any critical discussion. Hiawatha' hardly comes before us as a poem of the author's. He tells us himself that it was undertaken more for the sake of preserving a number of curious legends than with the intention of adorning them or idealizing them into an English poem.

We may regard it as a high testimonial to the pathos and tenderness of Longfellow that his 'Evangeline' has been popular, and very popular, in spite of the nondescript verse in which it is written. It is a poem too well known to need our praise, or to justify us in exemplifying its merits by lengthened extracts. Indeed, for our own part we must be contented here to re-echo the general applause; for we must confess that the metre-if metre it is to be called-in which it is written quite prevents us from taking any pleasure in its perusal, prevents us, in fact, from reading it at all with the necessary continuity. We feel that we could not do justice to any material that was wrought up in this new fashion. What the Courtship of Miles Standish'

may be, which is composed in the same irritating measure, we to this moment are absolutely ignorant, and must be permitted to remain ignorant. A simple English reader, unbiassed by classical association, talking of this hexameter line, described it but as a sort of limping prose with a curtsy at the end of it.' And, indeed, if we wanted to represent this measure to the eye, we should say that it was neither walking nor dancing, but a detestable mincing gait somewhere betwixt the two.

We are quite aware that this is one of the cases to which the old proverb upon taste, non disputandum, correctly applies. If any one should assert that he finds the charm of verse in this mimicry of the Greek or Latin poets, he has as complete right to his judgment as we to ours. Some men find a delightful music where others complain of insufferable noise. Some men might listen to a Scotch bagpipe, playing a reel or jig in the streets of London, and pronounce it exquisite melody. Perhaps, like our classicists, they have brought with them such strong associations of the thrilling power of that same Scotch bagpipe when heard at the head of a marching regiment of Highlanders,. that they listen rather with their memory than their present actual organ of sense. However that may be, they will persist in listening to the bagpipe, as it drones and jerks down the streets of London, and no argument can prove to them that it is not beautiful. Every poet, too, has a clear right to make what experiment he pleases upon our sense of hearing. We, on our side, can only claim the corresponding right of closing our ears. We therefore leave the soothing influence of the English hexameter to be decided by each reader for himself. But one observation lies open to us which is quite indisputable: it is the laziest business that ever called itself by the name of verse. Blank verse, it may be said, is surely as easy to write. Not at all. A writer of blank verse seeks for variety of pause, variety of cadence. Here nothing is to be done but to walk along, in mincing gait, to the end of the line, and then drop your curtsy. Besides, there is a certain excellence of material expected from the man who writes in blank verse: he feels that he pledges himself to compensate by the elevation of his thoughts for the absence of rhyme, and he enters into competition with our highest poets. But English hexameters are to his day a sort of experiment in verse, and pledge to nothing. No poet ever earned a reputation by writing them, though poets of repute have amused themselves, and reposed from their earnest labours, in this dilettante composition.

We, for our part, are far from undervaluing the charm of melodious verse, and very far indeed from acquiescing in that